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OTJIDA’S WORKS. 


Friendship 

Ariadne 

SiGNA 

In a Winter City . . . • 

Granville de Vigne . 

Strathmore 

Ch ANDOS 

Idalia 

Under Two Flags 

Tricotrin 

Puck 

Folle-Farine 

Pascarel 

Bebee ...... 

Cecil Castlemaine’s Gage 
Randolph Gordon .... 

Beatrice Boville 

A Leap in the Storm (8vo. Paper.) 


$1.50 
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1.50 
1.50 
1.50 
1.50 
1.50 
1.50 
1 50 
150 
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1.50 
1.60 
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50 


These Novels are universally acknowledged to be the most 
powerful and fascinating works of fiction which the present 
century, so prolific in light reading, has produced. 

The above are handsomely and uniformly bound in cloth, 
1 2mo form, and are for sale by booksellers generally, or will 
be sent by mail, postage paid, on receipt of price by 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., Publishers, 

715 and 717 Market St.^ Philadelphia. 


FEIENDSHIP. 


A STOEY OF SOCIETY. 




M 




By “OUIDA,” 



AUTHCm OP “STRATHMORE,” “GRANVILLE DE VIGNE,” “PUCK,” 
“ UNDER TWO FLAGS,” “ SIGNA,” ETC. 


“Si I’emploi de la Com^die est de corriger les vices, je ne vois pas par 
quelle raison il y en aura de privil^gi^s.” — Moliere. 



riTILADELPHIA: 


J. B. LIPI’INCOTT & CO. 
1878 . 


TZb 


2 


C 






A PKOPOS. 


A FROG that dwelt in a ditch spat at a worm that bore a lamp. 
“Why do you do that?” said the glowworm. 

“Why do you shine?” said the frog. 


Copyright, 1878, by J. B, Lippincott & Co. 


AVANT-PEOPOS. 


When Zeus, half in sport and half in cruelty, made man, 
young Hermes, who, as all Olympus knew, was for ever at some 
piece of mischief, insisted on meddling with his father’s work, 
and got leave to fashion the human ear out of a shell that he 
chanced to have by him, across which he stretched a fine cob- 
web that he stole from Arachne. But he hollowed and twisted 
the shell in such a fashion that it would turn back all sounds 
except very loud blasts that Falsehood should blow on a brazen 
horn, whilst the impenetrable web would keep out all such 
whispers as Truth could send up from the depths of her well. 

Hermes chuckled as he rounded the curves of his ear, and 
fastened it on to the newly-made Human Creature. 

“ So shall these mortals always hear and believe the thing 
that is not,” he said to himself in glee — knowing that the 
box he would give to Pandora would not bear more confused 
and complex woes to the hapless earth than this gift of an 
ear to man. 

But he forgot himself so far that though two ears were 
wanted, he only made one. 

Apollo, passing that way, marked the blunder, and resolved 
to avenge the theft of his milk-white herds which had led 
him such a weary chase through Tempe. 

Apollo took a pearl of the sea, and hollowed it, and strung 
across it a silver string from his own lyre, and with it gave to 
man one ear by which the voice of Truth should reach the 
brain. 


1 * 


5 


6 


A VANT-PROPOS. 


“ You have spoilt all my sport,” said the boy Hermes, 
angry and weeping. 

“ Nay,” said the elder brother, with a smile. “ Be com- 
forted. The brazen trumpets will be sure to drown the 
whisper from the well, and ten thousand mortals to one, be 
sure, will always turn by choice your ear instead of mine.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


CHAPTER I. 

“ It is a pull, sister,” said the elder Miss Moira of Craig 
Moira to the younger. 

“ It is a pull, sister. But we promised Archie.” 

“We promised Archie, and I’m wishful to see how she gets 
on wi’ the man that sold carpets.” 

So the carriage, bearing the Misses Moira of Craig Moira, 
their plaids, pugs, ear- trumpets, and courier, continued its 
course across the Boman Campagna, and up the steep and 
wooded roads that led to the old Castle of Fiordelisa. 

The Misses Moira of Moira lived on their own lands in 
Caithness, were very rich, very ugly, very eccentric, spoke with 
a strong native accent, and delivered their opinions uncalled 
for ; two of their sisters’ children were respectively the Duchess 
of Forfar and the Marquis of Fingal ; the younger was the 
echo of the elder, — both wore spectacles, both were deaf ; and 
neither ever forgot that the Moiras of Craig Moira had the 
right to sit before their sovereign, and were allied with half 
the bluest blood and highest names in Great Britain. 

They were now about to call on one of their connections, 
and gazed anxiously through their spectacles for the Castle of 
Fiordelisa, where she dwelt. Fiordelisa came at last in sight, 
— a gray, rambling, and ancient pile, set amidst cypress and 
ilex woods, with its gardens straying down into its farm-lands 
in Italian fashion, covering hills and plains with corn and vine 
and olive. 

“ A braw place this, but ill kept,” said the elder Miss Moira, 
as they entered a dark avenue of ancient oaks, “ and has the 
idolatrous emblems even at the very gates.” 


7 


8 


FRIENDSHIP. 


She shut her eyes not to see the Pieth let into the wall 
under the woods, and kept them shut lest she should see any 
more such signs. They had been brought into the land of 
such mummeries under protest by the dangerous illness of a 
beloved sister, mother of her young Grace of Forfar, at Naples, 
and, the sister being restored to health, they were hastening 
away from the scene of abominations, only pausing a few days 
in Home because the younger of them was somewhat of an 
invalid and unequal to rapid travelling. 

The sudden stoppage of the carriage made tho elder Miss 
Moira open her eyes. They had arrived at the entrance-door 
of Fiordelisa. 

Between the centre columns of a beautiful loggia, built 
by Bramante, there was standing a handsome, black -browed 
woman, a little in advance of two gentlemen, who stood one 
on each side of her, awaiting the arrival of the guests. 

She was the Lady Joan Challoner. 

With ardor and cordial eagerness of welcome she rushed 
down the stone steps and darted to the carriage. 

“ Oh, dearest Miss Moira, how kind of you ! And dear 
Miss Elizabeth, too ! How sorry I am not to be in Borne I 
We go down for good the day after to-morrow. If I had only 
known you were coming there, of course I should have gone 
in last week. Let me present them to you : Mr. Challoner ; 
Prince loris. Come in, pray, out of the sun. Yes, even in 
November it is oppressively warm. You must be overladen 
with all those plaids. Bobert ^lo ” 

“ Enchante de I’honneur de vous voir, mesdames,” murmured 
a tall, graceful, dark-eyed person, with a sweet smile and a low 
bow, coming forward on to the first step, and offering his arm 
to the old gentlewoman. 

“ Hoot toot, man ! Canna ye speak yer own tongue ?” said 
the elder Miss Moira, sharply, accepting the arm of her host, 
as she thought, and entering the house with him, whilst her 
sister followed with their hostess, who was talking eagerly into 
her ear-trumpet. The other gentleman, who had a Scotch face 
and a German manner, and looked like a fusion between a 
Leipsic philologist and an American senator, made a feeble 
attempt to offer his arm as well, but hesitated, not seeing very 
well how to do it, and halted midway, making believe to hold 
back a barking Clumber spaniel. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


9 


The whole party passed into the loggia, and thence into the 
first great apartment looking out from it, where some twenty 
other people, English and American residents of Rome, had 
been gathered to do honor to the Misses Moira of Moira, and 
were taking tea, eating grapes, and looking at pictures and 
china. Seated, the two ladies looked round the noble tapes- 
tried guest-chamber with some bewilderment and some vague 
displeasure. 

“ So ye’re Joan Perth-Douglas that was ?” said the elder 
Miss Moira, bringing her spectacles to bear on her hostess. 
“Ye were a slip of twelve when we saw ye last, — twenty years 
ago, ay, twenty years and more. Will ye tell me why your 
good husband talks French to us ?” 

“ Allow me, madam,” murmured the gentleman who looked 
like a Leipsic philologist and an American senator, oflFering 
to relieve her of her plaids. 

“ Don’t be ofl&cious, man !” said Miss Moira, sharply. 
“ My sister’s no richt in the lungs, and your master’s house 
is draughty.” 

The gentleman shrank back. 

“ I never saw a Scot so dark as your good husband, Joan,” 
pursued the elder Miss Moira, adhering to her original thoughts, 
sternly fastening her gaze upon the graceful and dark-eyed 
personage, who murmured a soft and perplexed “ Plait-il, 
madarne ?” 

“ Have you lived among papists till you’ve forgot every 
word of the tongue you were born to, sir?” asked Miss Moira 
of him, believing that she was addressing a fellow-country- 
man. 

“ You must be inconvenienced by all those plaids, madarne. 

Do allow me ” commenced in a kind of despair the other 

person who had been scouted. 

“ Ganna ye wait till ye’re spoke to 1” said the lady, turn- 
ing on him in wrath at the interference. “ Ganna ye teach 
your servants better ways, Leddy Joan, than to gird at a body 
like that? A very brown man for a Scot, your husband, 
though extraordinary well-favored. How comes it he canna 
talk his own tongue ?” 

“ That is not my husband,” said the Lady Joan, hurriedly, 
with a flush rising on her face and a laugh to her eyes. “ You 
are mistaken, dear Miss Moira. I introduce people so badly. 


10 


FRIENDSHIP. 


This is only loris, — a friend, you know. My husband, Mr. 
Challoner, you’ve been taking for a servant, and scolding 
about your plaids.” 

The well-bred twenty people who were taking tea at Fiord- 
elisa were not so perfectly well-bred that they could help a 
little titter as they listened. 

“ Prut-tut !” cried the elder Miss Moira, with her head 
higher in the air, being a person who never recognized her 
own errors, let them be made manifest as they might. “ This 
man received us, certainly he received us, at the door (1 am 
correct, sister ?). Certainly he received us, Leddy Joan. If 
you be master here,” she demanded, with sudden vigor, of 
the gentleman who she was informed was Mr. Challoner, as 
he returned with a cup of tea and a cream-jug , — “ if you be 
master here, why don’t you behave like it ? Are you master, 
eh?” 

Mr. Challoner, conscious of the twenty well-bred people and 
the irrepressible ill-bred titter, begged Miss Moira to tell him 
if she took much sugar or little. 

“ I can sugar for myself!” said that lady, with asperity. 
‘‘So you are Leddy Joan’s husband, are you? You don’t 
seem to conduct yourself like it. But I thought the other 
was very dark for a Scot.” 

“ Bo you take cream, madam ?” murmured Mr. Challoner, 
bending his back stiffly over the silver jug, whilst Miss Moira 
stared with stony gaze at the coronets and coats of arms on 
the chairs. 

“ Whose quarterings are those ?” she demanded. “ They’re 
none known north o’ Tweed, nor north o’ Thames either, for 
that matter : the shape o’ the shield ” 

“ Bear Miss Moira, allow me ,” said the Lady Joan, 

avoiding heraldry by bringing up a small division of the twenty 
well-bred people for presentation. But Miss Moira was not to 
be so lightly diverted from her purpose. Having bent her 
head as many times as politeness required, she retained her 
grasp on Mr. Challoner, and returned to her original investi- 
gations. “ A fine place,” she resumed, letting her eyes rove 
from the timber roof to the mosaic floor ; “a fine place. Is 
it your own ?” 

Mr. Challoner murmured inarticulately, and stooped for the 
sugar-tongs. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


11 


“ Bought it?” said Miss Moira, sharply. 

“ No, — not precisely.” 

“ Hired it ?” 

“ Not exactly. That is, at least ” 

Mr. Challoner shifted his eyeglass, and, being an exact man, 
paused to find an exact word. 

“ Oh, my gude soul, then if ye’ve na bought it and na hired 
it, it’s na yours at all ; and what for be ye speering to ask us 
into it?” 

Mr. Challoner wondered to himself why an unkind Provi- 
dence would move old maiden ladies from their own safe ingle- 
nooks by gray Atlantic shores, and muttered something of “ a 
friend, an old friend.” 

“ Oh, it’s the dark man’s, is it ? He don’t look old,” said 
Miss Moira, “ and you and your good leddy live in it out of 
friendship. Is that the custom in this papistical country, 
pray, sir?” 

Mr. Challoner murmured that he thought it was the custom, 
— “ the houses were so large, the nobility were so poor ” 

“ And has he a good leddy ? What does she say to it ? 
Certainly, Leddy Joan asked us out here as to her ovm place. 
Quite clearly, — her own place. I am correct, sister?” 

“ Quite correct, sister. Her own place.” 

“ loris is not married,” said Mr. Challoner, wondering if he 
could drop the sugar-tongs again without too much awkward- 
ness. “ He is a good fellow. We are ver}^ much attached to 
him. Will you like to see my greenhouses ? I am curious 
in the nymph aea, cyanea, coerulea, rubra ” 

“ A pond-lily’s a puir feckless taste for a man,” said Miss 
Moira, severely. “ Archie asked us to come and see his 
daughter, and so we came. But certainly when she called on 
us she said her ‘ own place,’ — most distinctly her own place.” 

“ Oh, she has got into the habit of calling it so : she has 
done so much for it ” 

“ But if it be the young man’s ” 

Lady Joan Challoner begged at that moment to present to 
Miss Moira an Anglican clergyman. 

The Anglican clergyman disposed of. Miss Moira of Craig 
Moira returned to the charge. 

“ Eh, but it must be a perilous experiment, — twa masters 
under one roof.” 


12 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Eh, it must, indeed,” murmured the younger Miss Moira. 
“ Mony voices make muckle strife.” 

“ Ay, they do. Tell me, now, do you twa good gentlemen 
never fash one another?” 

“Never,” said Mr. Challoner, cordially; but his cold light 
eyes fell as he spoke. 

“ Then ye’re just no human, sir,” said Miss Moira, with 
emphasis ; “ and Joan Perth-Douglas had always a sharp 
tongue of her own. Perth-Douglas women never were easy 
to live with. You seem a quiet body yourself, but still ” 

“ Let me show you my wife’s fowls. The fame of the 
poultry of Craig Moira ” commenced Mr. Challoner. 

“ Still, I think you’re no wise, and so I’ll tell Archie,” con- 
tinued Miss Moira, not to be moved even by praise of her 
poultry-yard. “ It’s a queer way of living, and certainly she 
said her own place, ‘ her own place,’ and ye’ll no take oifence, 
for I always speak my mind, but that Papist’s a deal too bonny 
to look at, and Leddy Joan’s a young woman still.” 

“ My dear madam, I have not the most distant idea of your 
meaning ” 

“ Then ye’re just a fule, sir,” said Miss Moira, sharply. 

“ Will you look at my wife’s poultry ? She has some 
spangled bantams that ” 

“ Eh ? Joan Perth-Douglas has taken to cocks and hens 
and bubbly-jocks, has she? Weel, there’s no accounting for 
conversions. Perth-Douglas women were always a handful. 
I’ve known three generations of them, and they always were 
masterful. Dear douce Archie never daured say his soul was 
his own. Yes, I’ll come and see your chicks and stove-plants. 
But how can they be yours if the place is the Papist’s ?” 

“ It was a tumble-down old barrack. We have spent a good 
deal on it. One is always glad to do good to a friend,” mur- 
mured Mr. Challoner, a little vaguely, offering his arm to his 
tormentor. 

“ Humph !” said the elder Miss Moira, with a sniff. 

“We are quite farmers here, you know,” Mr. Challoner 
continued, leading the way through courts and chambers to 
the open air. “ The whole thing had gone to rack and ruin 
when we took it in hand. Italians are so improvident, and 
the national habits are so wasteful. But my wife’s energy is 
wonderful : whatever she undertakes prospers ” 


FRIENDSHIP. 13 

“ Humph !” said the elder Miss Moira, once more. “ And 
the handsome Papist, is he grateful to ye for her energy ?” 

“ Oh, don’t talk about gratitude. There is no question of 
that. We are always glad to be of use to our friends, and 
loris is an excellent fellow. Ask Lord Archie.” 

Lord Archie was an idol of Craig Moira, and his word was 
law there. Miss Moira was softened by it, and her suspicions 
were mollified. She consented to be conducted through the 
green-house, praised the bantams, and only snified a little as 
she passed the open door of the castle chapel, where- some 
peasants were going in for vespers. She returned in a more 
amiable frame of mind to her sister and her sofa, and relented 
enough to take a fresh cup of tea and some fruit, which was 
handed her with exquisite grace by the Prince loris. Miss 
Moira’s eyes, through their spectacles, followed the Prince loris 
to the other end of the large reception-room. 

“ He’s an elegant-made man, and a taking one,” she said 
to her host ; “ and I think ye’re no wise to live in the same 
house with him. Oh, ye’ve no need to glower and look glum: 
an old body like me can tell truth without fiishin’ anybody, 
and ye know that we and Archie’s people have foregathered 
all our lives, and it never was hid from us that Joan Perth- 
Douglas was masterful and had her cantrips. Lord, man ! do 
ye think they’d have wedded her to a mere decent body like 
you, if she hadn’t been a handful ? Not they ; they’re proud- 
stomached, and ye sold carpets and the like in Bagdad.” 

“ Really, madam ” Mr. Challoner shifted his eyeglass, 

and felt that this kind of amiability was worse to bear than 
the previous antagonism. 

“ Hoot ! it’s no sort of use giving yourself bobberies with 
us. We know all about you,” said Miss Moira, pleasantly. 
“Your forbears were decent folks, dwellers on my cousin 
Allandale’s lands on the Border for mony a generation, pious 
canny bodies, but sma’ traders all. I mind well when I was 
a bit lassie, and staying at Allandale’s, buying tapes and pins, 
and what not, at your grandmother’s little shop. She sold 
snuff and letter-papers, and had the post, and sold stamps as 
weel, — twa-bawbee stamps they were in those days. Ye mind 
it too, don’t ye, sister?” 

“ Kicht well, sister. She sold sweeties too.” 

• “Lord, man, its sma’ blame to ye. Your folk were all 
• 2 


14 


FRIENDSHIP. 


decent folk in the Cheviots, and true believers. But I’ll not 
deny that when ye stuck up on your countin’-house stool so 
high that ye mated with Archie’s daughter, we did set our 
necks stiff, and ” 

Mr. Challoner threw down a piece of majolica. It belonged 
to the house, and would cost him nothing, and the crash of 
the falling vase spared him more recollections of Allandale. 

“ Sister, we must be going. The sun’s well-nigh down,” 
said the elder Miss Moira, when the majolica was picked up. 
“ Now, sir, take an old woman’s word, and don’t disremember 
that your good leddy’s a Perth-Douglas, and Perth-Douglas 
women are always like bucking fillies ; and the Papist’s got a 
face o’ grace and a pretty way with him. Oh, you may get 
on your high horse as ye like ! Sense is sense. Still, I’m 
glad to see ye have such a trust in your wife, and it speaks 
well for ye both, and shows she’s given over her cantrips ; 
and I’m sorry I fashed ye about your grandame, but there’s 
nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all. She was a good 
clean religious body, and I’m not one to look down on ye 
because ye are not what we are, though I’m free to own when 
they married Joan to ye we quarrelled with Archie, as far as 
anybody ever can quarrel with him, the fair, sweet-spoken 
soul ” 

Mr. Challoner, conscious of a sudden silence that had fallen 
on the twenty well-bred people scattered about, behind, and 
around him, in which the voice of his torturer fell horribly 
loud and distinct, wished that the mosaic floor would open as 
the gulf for Curtius. 

“Joan’s a fine-featured woman,” pursued Miss Moira, rising 
in all her plaids, “ but she’s a Perth-Douglas, and she’s got a 
wild eye. You mind my word when I’m gone. Look after 
her well with the Papist. And now good-day, and many 
thanks to ye, Leddy Joan. I’m mighty glad to see ye’ve 
taken to such a sober thing as tillin’ land and fattin’ fowls, 
and I hope ye’ll keep steady at it ; and, yes, to be sure. I’ll 
remember ye to my niece, Forfar, though she’s never seen ye, 
and I doubt if she’s ever heard o’ ye, and ye’re scarce cousin 
to her, as ye’re Sayin’, — it’s very far away, indeed ; one of 
your forbears in the last century married the then duke’s 
seventh daughter, and they were Archie’s father’s great- 
grandfather’s cousins- german ; still, it counts, — oh, yes, it 


FRIENDSHIP. 


15 


counts, and I’ll give her your love for certain ; and so I’ll bid 
ye farewell, and many thanks to ye, and we’ll return it in kind 
whenever ye come north again. And I suppose ye don’t 
travel with the Papist, but ye can explain to him that we’d 
be glad to see him in Caithness, for it might be the saving of 
his soul if he came in reach of the true doctrine, and our 
minister would weary the Lord for him night and day, for he 
is a personable man and a courteous, and it is sad to think he 
will burn in the life everlasting.” 

“ Mille remerciments, mesdames, et h. revoir,” murmured 
the Prince loris, vaguely gathering that they were wishing 
him well, and offering them a bouquet of autumnal heliotrope 
and Louise de Savoie roses. 

The Miss Moiras accepted the flowers, and drove away in 
state, pugs, plaids, ear-trumpets, courier, and all, on their re- 
turn journey towards Pome. 

“ There is a deal in manner, sister,” said the elder Miss 
Moira, as she smelt the heliotrope. 

“ There is, sister. What were ye meaning ?” 

“ That the Papist has a manner, and that the carpet-man 
hasn’t,” replied the elder Miss Moira. “ Let us hope that 
Leddy Joan canna see the difierence, and has steadied down. 
But I have my doubts, sister.’’ 

“ And ye do well to have your doubts, sister. Ye were 
ever very sharp o’ sight.” 

The elder Miss Moira snified with scorn the bland air of 
the Poman twilight. 

“ It needs but half an eye, Elizabeth, to see that a Perth- 
Douglas woman loves her cantrips, and that the Papist is a 
deal bonnier to look at than the person that sold carpets. But 
she was very civil, and her gude man seems a well-meaning 
douce body, and she’s steadied down ; I shall say so every- 
where ; she’s steadied down, and we must do all we can for 
her, sister. She is Archie’s daughter.” 

“ She is Archie’s daughter, sister.” 

The elder Miss Moira would have changed her amicable 
intentions if she could have seen her hostess dancing a war- 
dance in the loggia and snapping her fingers after the vanish- 
ing carriage. 

“ The hateful old cats !” cried the Lady Joan ; “ I thought 
they’d never go ! Wretched old women ! Why didn’t you 


16 


FRIENDSHIP. 


stop their tongues, Robert ? And what an ass ^ou were, lo, 
receiving them like that ! Of course they couldn’t help find- 
ing out the house was yours, and old idiots like those will 
never understand ” 

“ They were good harmless people,” said the Prince loris, 
in his own tongue, a little timidly, standing under the arch 
of his loggia, and watching the sunset. 

“ Stuff! they are the most horrid old harridans in existence. 
But every old hag seems good to you. I do believe you see 
good in everybody 1 The idea, too, of wasting those roses on 
’em ! Roses sell for half a franc apiece now. And giving 
them yourself, too I They’ve been boring Mr. Challoner to 
death about what you are here, and whose the house is. But 
you’re always doing something ridiculous. Only remember 
this. Give your head away with the roses next time, if you 
like, only all I insist is, don’t compromise me 

The Prince loris was silent. He leaned against a column 
of the loggia, and watched the sun go down behind the hills. 

Lady Joan Challoner and her husband went within to the 
twenty well-bred people, and busied themselves pleasantly with 
them, and gave parting smiles and Muscat grapes to some, 
and retained a few to dinner. 

Meanwhile, the Miss Moiras rolled onward to Rome through 
the descending mists of evening, and, nodding amidst their 
cushions, fell asleep, until, roused by the cessation of all move- 
ment and a voice they knew, they were startled to find that 
the carriage was entering the gates of Rome. A gentleman, 
old, bent, feeble, smiled and nodded, came up and shook hands, 
as the horses were stopped for a moment by the pressure of 
traffic. This gentleman was Lord George Scrope-Stair, an 
old acquaintance and a privileged person. 

“ You have been to see Pope Joan?” he said, with a little 
laugh. “Did you like Fiordelisa?” And he nodded and 
laughed again. “ Ah 1 yes, we always call her Pope Joan, 
— I do, at least, when my daughters don’t hear me : Pope 
Joan keeps the keys of both heaven and earth, and ousts Peter 
out of his own palace, you know ! Only my little joke. 
Don’t tell the girls. Good-night.” 

And the old man, who had been once a dandy and a beau 
in days when George the Fourth was king, walked onward in 
the twilight, chuckling feebly. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


17 


“Pope Joan!” echoed Miss Moira of Moira, as their car- 
riage rolled over the stones. “ Sister, I wish we had not gone 
to the place 1” 

“ So do I, sister,” said the echo. 

They went peacefully home to their hotel and dined, with 
misgivings weighing on their souls, and then, being tired, slept 
again until the elder Miss Moira awoke from a blissful doze 
with a start. 

“ I wonder whose the place really is, sister ?” she mumbled, 
as she yawned. 

“ I wonder, sister,” said the echo. 


CHAPTER II. 

It was sunset on the Pincio on the first day of December. 
Beyond St. Peter’s there was that sky of purple and of gold 
which always seems so much more marvellous here than it 
does anywhere else, — that roseleaf warmth and soft trans- 
parency of flame-like color which those who have looked on 
it never will forget so long as their lives shall last on earth. 

Below, loud, cracked, discordant bells were chiming one 
against another ; near at hand a military band was playing, 
very fast and very much out of tune, waltzes of Strauss ; a 
monk, the worse for wine, was screaming homilies from a 
bench, and guards were vainly striving to arrest him amidst 
the laughter of the crowd ; but nothing spoiled the grandeur 
of the scene, or could destroy the sublime calmness of the de- 
clining day, as the broken green lines of the hills grew black 
against the burning scarlet of the clouds, and the vast expanse 
of roofs and spires, cupolas and towers, obelisks and gardens, 
ruins and palaces, colossal temples and desolate marshes, that is 
all called Rome, stretched away wide and vague and solemn 
as a desert; with a sun, nearly as red and rayless as the 
desert’s, hanging above the cross on the great dome. 

It was four o’clock ; and there was the customary crowd 
of fashionable idlers, fretting horses, emblazoned carriages, 
sauntering dandies, handsome artists, tired invalids, black- 
robed priests and scarlet-clad janitors, cuirassed soldiers and 

2 * 


18 


FRIENDSHIP. 


curly-headed children, violet-gowned seminarists and purple- 
gowned scholars, and, first and foremost, fashionable ladies 
chattering at the top of their voices about the first fox-hunt 
of the year, the first court ball, the new arrivals, and the 
Pope’s state of health. 

The sun was going down in majesty behind the round 
domes raised to lay the restless soul of Nero ; but up here 
on the hill scarcely anybody looked at it, but idling and 
laughing and talking people turned their backs to the west, 
to hear the music better, and kept looking instead at one 
woman as she passed, and murmured to each other in a little 
flutter, “ Dear me ! There is Etoile, and the Coronis,” and 
then reassured each other, and said, “ Yes, indeed, — oh, yes, 
really, that is Etoile with the Coronis,” in a certain tone of 
disappointment because she was only like any other well- 
dressed woman after all, and humanity considers that when 
genius comes forth in the flesh the touch of the coal from 
the altar should have left some visible stigmata on the lips it 
has burned, as, of course anybody knows, it invariably leaves 
some smirch upon the character. 

Humanity feels that genius ought to wear a livery, as Jews 
and loose women wore yellow in the old golden days of dis- 
tinction. 

“ They don’t even paint !” said one lady, and felt herself 
aggrieved. 

Nevertheless the lady and all the rest of the crowd con- 
tinued to look. 

Dorotea Coronis they had all of them seen many scores of 
times through their opera-glasses at Covent Garden, the Grand 
Opera, and the theatre at Baden ; but Etoile they had hardly 
any of them ever seen, and they stared with all the admirable 
impudence of a well-born mob. 

“ They don’t seem to see us,” said the aggrieved lady who 
had wondered they did not paint. 

“ Look deuced proud,” muttered an Englishman who had 
lifted his hat eagerly and put it on sulkily, being unnoticed. 

The carriage swept by again, and both the women in it 
looked at the sunset, and not at the crowd. The crowd began 
to feel neglected and to grow ill-natured. Sovereigns took the 
trouble to bow : why could not these two, whose only royalty 
was that of art ? 


FRIENDSHIP. 


19 


“ Who is Etoile?” said the crowd. 

“An enigma without an (Edipus,” said one of its idlers, who 
thought himself a wit. 

“ There is no enigma at all, except in your imaginations,” 
said another idler, who was old and grave, which was a foolish 
remark, no doubt, because an enigma that is purely imaginary 
must be of necessity the most puzzling of all, since it follows 
as a matter of course that nobody ever can solve it. 

The carriage paused, and its occupants bought Parma violets. 
The crowd was disposed to think there must be some motive 
for the action, as it eyed dubiously the boar-hound trotting 
behind the carriage, and would fain have believed that his 
tongue hanging out meant a mystery, and that he broke a 
commandment in wagging his tail. 

It is one of the privileges of celebrity that the person cele- 
brated can never wash his hands or open an umbrella without 
being accredited with some occult reason for his proceedings. 

“ Is it really Etoile ?” said the crowd. Generally speaking, 
people were disposed to believe that she was not herself, but 
somebody else. 

She did not see them. She had a sad habit of not seeing 
those who surrounded her. When, recalled to a sense of her 
negligence, she begged the pardon of others for having over- 
looked them, she was not readily forgiven. People would 
rather be insulted than be unperceived. 

Her equipage, with its long-tailed Roman horses, went the 
round of the Pincio, past the cactus and aloes, the water- 
clock and the kiosques for toys, the music-stands, and the 
garden-chairs, and the various other embellishments placed 
here, where Augustus mused and Caesar and Pompeius supped. 

She gazed at the lovely light, rosy as blown pomegranate- 
leaves, with little puffs of golden cloud upon it, light as a 
cherub’s curls. 

“ How matchless it is !” she said, with a sigh. 

“It is Rome,” said Horotea Coronis. 

And for them both, the crowd ceased to exist. They only 
saw the slow-descending sun. 

To be wise in this world one should always be blind to the 
sunset, but never to the people that bow. The sun, neglected, 
will not freckle us any more than if we had penned him a 
thousand sonnets as the lord of light. A man or a woman. 


20 


FRIENDSHIP. 


slighted, will burn us brown all over with blistering spots of 
censure, indelible as stains of iodine, and deep as wounds of 
vitriol. 

“ Is it really Etoile ?” said the erowd, eagerly, and scarcely 
looked at the brilliant Gitana-like loveliness of her companion, 
the great Coronis, because it was familiar, but turned and 
stared with all the stony-hearted inquisitiveness of Society at 
the little they could see of the one whom they called Etoile, 
which was indeed only a heap of silver-fox furs, a pile of 
violets, a knot of old Flemish lace, and dreaming serious eyes 
that watched the sunset. 

She herself scarcely saw that any crowd was there. This 
kind of oblivion was usually her deadliest sin, and she was 
unconscious that she sinned, which made it very much worse. 
People blew their bubbles or threw their stones about her, and 
she never heeded either, though indeed the stones came so 
thickly sometimes that she ought in common gratitude to have 
been flattered ; calumny is the homage of our contemporaries, 
as some South Sea Islanders spit on those they honor. 

Popularity has been defined as the privilege of being cheered 
by the kind of people you would never allow to bow to you. 

Fame may be said to be the privilege of being slandered at 
once by the people who do bow to you, as well as by the peo- 
ple who do not. 

“ Who is she?” said the crowd on the Pincio. 

Nobody there knew at all. So everybody averred they 
kn€?\v for certain. Nobody’s story agreed with anybody else’s, 
but that did not matter at all. The world, like Joseph’s father, 
gives the favorite a coat of many colors, which the brethren 
rend. 

“ She says herself ” hinted the old grave idler, member 

of many clubs; but nobody wanted to hear what she said 
herself. Pas si hete I Of course she told a story well and laid 
on the right colors ; nobody had talents like hers for nothing. 

The old idler got no listeners, and went away pensively to 
lean on the parapet. He was so far in the minority as to be- 
lieve what she said herself, which was quite simple and com- 
paratively uneventful, and, therefore, evidently improbable. 
If she had said she had new lovers every night, and killed 
them in a back garden every morning, like the Jewess of the 
French Regency, people might have believed: there would 


FRIENDSHIP. 


21 


have been nothing staggeringly and audaciously impossible 
about that. 

The crowd on the Pincio, when the whisper of her name 
had first run through it, had been alive with admiration and 
cordiality; but the crowd felt that it had had cold water 
thrown on its enthusiasm, and so began to hiss, as fire under i 
cold water always does. 

“ Very clever indeed,” said the crowd. “ Oh, yes, no doubt. 
Oh, wonderful, quite wonderful, every one knew that; but 
who was she ? Ah ! nobody could tell. Oh, yes, indeed, it 
was quite well known. She was a beggar’s brat found on a 
door-step ; she was a cardinal’s daughter ; she was a princess’s 
petite faute; she was a Rothschild’s mistress ; she was a Cabi- 
net Minister’s craze ; she was poor De Morny’s daughter ; she 
had been a slave in Circassia ; she had been a serf in White 
Russia; she had been found frozen, with a tambourine in 
her hand, outside the gates at Vincennes ; her father was at 
the galleys ; her mother kept an inn. No, they were both 
imperial spies, and very rich ; no, they were both dead ; no, 
nobody ever said that, they said this. The poor Emperor 
knew beyond doubt ; and the secret had died with him. She 
was quite out of society, she was in the highest society ; she 
was not received anywhere, she was received everywhere. Oh, 
that was not true, but this was. Well, the less said the better.” 

When the world has decided that the less said the better, 
it always proceeds directly to say everything in the uttermost 
abundance that it can possibly think of, and it did so on the 
Pincio this day at sunset, and asked a variety of questions as 
well. 

“ Why had she come?” 

“ Was she going to remain ?” « 

“ Would she go out at all?” 

“ Would she receive?” 

“ Would she be received?” 

“ Would she go to the legations?” 

“Were those Russian furs?” 

“ Was that dress Worth’s?” 

“ Why did she stop her horses there, with her back to 
everybody, where she couldn’t hear a note of the music ?” 

So they chattered, in much excitement, gazing at her through 
their eye-glasses or from under their parasols. 


22 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Nobody there happened to know anything, except that she 
had come to Rome from Paris, by Nice and Genoa, the pre- 
vious night ; but there was a general feeling that there was 
probably something wrong. 

Why did she turn the back of her carriage to them and 
buy Parma violets ? 

In a little while, as the sun grew into a solemn red ball be- 
hind the purple dome, and the shadows became longer, the 
throng began to go down the great winding stairways towards 
the square below, where the waters fell from the marble mouths, 
and the grave sphinxes were couched beneath the drooping 
boughs. 

A lady, wrapped in sealskin, with a sealskin hat set well 
over her brows, began to move also with the two persons who 
formed her escort. The trio was composed of Lady Joan 
Challoner and her husband and the Prince loris. 

“ Is that Etoile?” said the Lady Joan, eagerly, as the car- 
riage dashed past them, and she caught the name spoken by 
some bystanders. 

“ Is that reely Etoile, now ? Do tell,” said a fashionable 
American of her acquaintance, joining her, by name Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams. 

“ They say so. I’ve never seen her myself,” answered Lady 
Joan. “ lo, and I, and Mr. Challoner have just been to call 
on her, but she was out. She has brought me letters.” 

“ Reely, now ! How interestin’ !” said the fashionable 
American. “ Well, it’s a very elegant turn-out, now, aren’t 
it?” My word! ” 

“ You can get anything you like to pay for in Rome,” said 
the Lady Joan, with much contempt : she herself was on foot. 

I must be civil to her. Voightel begs me to be so, and my 
father too ; I must have her to dinner. Will you come, Mrs. 
Clams?” 

“ Oh, thanks, now ; that’s reel kind 1” said Mrs. Henry V. 
Clams. “ I’m dyin’ to see her, dyin’, and I’ve got a bet in 
N’York about the way she wears her hair. But they do say 
she’s so rude, you know ; Cyrus C. Butterfield — as works the 
Saratoga press, you know — wrote to ask her to send him every 
particular of her life from her baptism upwards, and — would 
you believe it? — her secretary — a female, I believe — sent him 
back his own letter ! There 1” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


23 


The Lady Joan laughed Portly. 

“ I should say Cyrus C. Butterfield’s inquiries would be 
particularly inconvenient to her! I wonder why on earth 
she has come to Borne !” 

“ Is there anything strange in coming to Borne ?” said the 
Prince loris, in his soft Boman tongue. 

“ No ; of course no. What silly things you say ! Only, 
of course she’s got some motive. She’s with Coronis, 
too.” 

“ The loveliest woman in Europe,” said Mr. Challoner, with 
solemnity and unction. 

“ Wretched creature !” said the Lady Joan. 

“ My word, now, what she's up to ?” inquired Mrs. Henry 
V. Clams, with lively interest. “ Why, she’s Duchesse San- 
torin, aren’t she ?” 

“ And the duke is going to divorce her.” 

“ My ! You don’t say so !” 

“ Santorin is very thankless : she has paid his debts again 
and again,” murmured the Prince loris. 

“ Oh, everybody that sings is an angel to you, lo !” said 
Lady Joan, with some irritation. 

“ If she’s paid his debts, he’s paid by the nose ! Every- 
body knows what these professional women always are. I 
dare say Etoile herself is no better.” 

“ My dear love,” said Mr. Clialloner, with serious reproof, 
“ surely you forget. Would your father ever ” 

“ My father’s an ass where a petticoat’s concerned, and he’d 
swear it had all the virtues inside it if it had only taken his 
fancy. He makes a great fuss about her. Voightel, too, who 
believes in nobody, believes in her. It’s so queer I I sup- 
pose she’s only sharper than most people.” 

“ I never heard a word ” began the Prince loris. 

“ Stuff 1” said the Lady Joan. “ There are heaps of stories, 
— hideous stories. And there’s no smoke without fire, that’s 
certain. What day shall we ask her to dinner?” 

“ Well, now, I did read years ago, in our country, that she 
lived with a stoker as she’d taken a fancy to in the Lyons cars 
once,” said Mrs. Henry V. Clams, reflectively, searching into 
the recesses of her memory. 

Mr. Challoner and the Prince loris laughed outright. 

“ I never heard of the stoker, but I dare say there are things 


24 


FRIENDSHIP. 


quite as fishy,” said the Lady Joan. “ What night shall we 
fix? Will the 6th suit you, Mrs. Clams?” 

They sauntered on by the stone balustrades with the scat- 
tered groups, who were all making for the Corso, or walking 
under the Tempietto, Babuino-way, and who were all more 
or less talking of Etoile and of Dorotea Coronis. 

The groups seldom said anything that was amiable of either, 
still less seldom anything that was true. But to be thus 
spoken of at all constitutes what the world calls Fame, and 
ever since the days of Horace the world has wondered that 
the objects of it are not more grateful for the distinction of 
detraction. 

“ Why do you spit ?” says the glow-worm. 

“ Why do you shine?” says the frog. 


CHAPTER HI. 

At the entrance of the Corso, Mr. Challoner recollected an 
appointment with a friend: his wife and the Prince loris 
strolled on down the Corso together. 

It was the hour when the street was at its fullest and 
prettiest ; the irregular casements were half lighted, half 
dark; the painted and gilded signs swung in the shadows; 
lamps hung above balconies draped with red ; in a church 
doorway white priests were chanting with torches flickering ; 
at the corners stood great baskets of violets and camellias, rose 
and white ; knots of pifferari droned the wild, sad monotones 
of the music of the hills ; at a quick march a file of hersa- 
glieri^ with their plumes streaming, were coming up the narrow 
way as up a mountain-pass ; horses were trampling, drums 
were beating loud. 

“ I wonder how you will like Etoile, lo ; you always do 
like queer people !” said the Lady Joan, as they moved down 
into that picturesque chaos and luminous mingling of the 
night and day. 

Her companion answered, with gallant grace, “ Whatever 
she is, she will be only for me — la terza incommoda ! ’ 

The Lady Joan laughed, well pleased, as she pushed her 


FRIENDSHIP. 


25 


•way through the lively and laughing crowds down to the 
Palazzo di Venezia. In an angle near the Ripresa dei Bar- 
beri, where two streets crossed each other in that populous 
and convenient locality, there was a small house squeezed 
between two grim palaces, and known as the Casa Challoner 
to the society and the tradespeople of Rome. 

The Lady Joan climbed the stone stairs of the Casa 
Challoner with agility, and her companion followed with 
the accustomed matter-of-course air of a man who returns 
home. 

The house was dusky, there was only one lamp lighted in 
the anteroom, but she pushed her way safely into a little 
chamber heavy with the smell of Turkish tobacco and hung 
with Turkish stuffs and fitted with Turkish couches. 

On one of the divans the Prince loris cast himself a little 
wearily. 

The Lady Joan lit a cigarette, stuck it between her teeth, 
cast aside her sealskins, and began to look over a pile of 
letters. 

“I wish she hadn’t come, bother her!” she muttered. 
“ Here’s pages more of eulogy from that old Tartar, Voightel. 
She seems to be perfection. I hate perfect people.” 

The Prince loris stretched himself out, and closed his eyes ; 
his friend continued her examination of her correspondence. 
There was ten minutes’ silence, broken only by the ticking of 
a Flemish chime-clock. 

At the end of ten minutes Lady Joan looked ujt impa- 
tiently. 

“ Don’t lie there, lo, doing nothing : tell me what we’ve got 
for next week, that I may settle this dinner.” 

He sighed, raised himself, and took out a set of tablets 
from his pocket. 

“ You have the English bishop and bishopess to-morrow.” 

“ ‘ Bishopess 1’ Well, go on.” 

“ The Echeance soir4e on the 3d.” 

“ Can’t miss that. Well?” 

“You take more English to the Opera on the 4 th.” 

“ Aprls 

“ 5th, masked ball at the Greek Legation.” 

“ 6th, Saturday ?” 

“ Two teas, — names English that I cannot pronounce.” 

B 3 


26 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ We’ll throw over the teas. 6th will do. Get some cards, 
and fill ’em up.” 

He obeyed, and went to a little writing-table. 

“ She’s a sensational creature to have,” continued his friend: 
“ it’s best to have her seen here first, before anybody else takes 
the cream off it. Whom shall we ask ? Clever people they 
must be, and people that go in for that sort of thing. Ask 
Lady Cardiff : she won’t mind if Etoile does startle the pro- 
prieties.” 

He filled in the card obediently; and she dictated some 
dozen other names to him, leaning over his shoulder as he 
wrote. 

“ Now fill in Etoile’s,” she said. “ I’ll send a little note 
with it, too, to be civil. That old beast Voightel and papa 
make such a fuss ” 

“ I cannot put — Etoile ?” 

“ Of course not. You must put Comtesse d’Avesnes. Did 
ever you hear such rubbish ? And papa and Voightel believe 
in her, title and all.” 

“Why should they not?” said the writer, as he slid the 
cards into their envelopes. 

The Lady Joan put her tongue in her cheek, and jumped a 
step of the hornpipe. 

“ As much countess as the cat ! Now, do draw that trip- 
tych that old Norwich wants so ; make haste. We dine at 
seven, you know, because of the theatre. Send Anselmo with 
the notes to-morrow morning. Etoile’s you might leave to- 
night. She’s on your way home. I’ll write her note now.” 

She crossed over to her bureau, and wrote a pretty epistle, 
which ended, — 

“ Pray kindly waive ceremony, and come to us on Saturday ; 
my dear father and so many of our common friends have spoken 
so much of you that I cannot even think of yOu as a stranger, 
and my husband will be as glad as I to have the honor of re- 
ceiving Etoile in our Roman home.” 

Then she wrote another, which began, — 

“ Dearest Voightel, — The hint of a wish of yours is a de- 
light and a command to me ; you know how I love and honor 
all genius.” 

Then she scampered through half a dozen more notes, with 
the pen of a ready writer, jumped up and crossed over to where 


FRIENDSHIP. 27 

her friend sat, sketching by the light of a reading-lamp, and 
ran her fingers through his soft dark hair. 

“How slow you are, lo ! You’ve only drawn one wing yet, 
and I’ve written fifteen letters.” 

That night the Prince loris, after escorting the Lady Joan 
to and from the broad fun of the Valle Theatre, walked through 
the white Roman moonlight to his own palace in the street of 
the Ripetta, and pausing, as he went, at the Hotel de Russie, 
left the Lady Joan’s note for the Comtesse d’Avesnes. 

“ Etoile : it is a pretty name,” he thought to himself. 
“ Whose star is she beside her own ? A great artist, all the 
world knows; what else may she be, I wonder?” 

Now, to wonder about any woman was a liberty and a lux- 
ury forbidden to him. 

The key of his very thoughts hung to the girdle of the 
Lady Joan as she moved, and lay under the pillow of the 
Lady Joan as she slept, — or she believed it did, which satis- 
fied her quite as well. 


CHAPTER IV. 


Who was Etoile? 

The world in general said it as often as the crowd on the 
Pincio. 

They never attended to what she said herself. Nobody 
wants facts. Facts are hardly more amusing than mathe- 
matics, — unless, indeed, they are the kind of facts that you 
can only just whisper under your breath. And of this kind 
of facts — the only kind that can in any way be diverting to 
others — the life of the great Belgian artist remained conspicu- 
ously, absurdly, inconsistently, and inconsiderately barren. 

The world supplied the deficiency. 

The world supplies you with history as our great tailor sup- 
plies us with dresses : he surveys our face and figure and se- 
lects for us what is appropriate. The world cuts out its gossip 
on the same judicious lines : whether you like what is given 
you is of no moment either to Worth or the world : you have 
got to wear it. 


28 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Be thankful that you are Somebody. Neither Worth nor 
the world would trouble themselves to fit you if you were 
not. 

In the morning Society that had been on the Pincio read 
in its papers that Etoile was in Rome on account of her health. 
Physicians had advised perfect repose and a warmer winter 
than Paris or Brussels can ofier. Society read the paragraph, 
and, putting down the papers, wondered what the paragraph 
was meant to cover. Something, of course. Heaps of things, 
probably. Health, indeed ! What rubbish ! Wasn’t it a 
sculptor ? . . . No ; money ! . . . Ah, money ? . . . Oh, in- 
deed, much worse than that! . . . Exile was orc^erecZ, quite 
ordered from the Elys6e. You understand? Everybody 
whispered, nodded, seemed to understand, because nobody did 
understand in the least ; and nobody, of course, could endure 
to look so ignorant. 

When a name is on the public mouth the public nostril 
likes to smell a foulness in it. It likes to think that Byron 
committed incest ; that Milton was a brute ; that Raffaelle’s 
vices killed him ; that Pascal was mad ; that Lamartine lived 
and died a pauper; that Scipio took the treasury moneys; 
that Thucydides and Phidias stole ; that Heloise and Hypatia 
were but loose women after all : so the gamut runs over twice 
a thousand years ; and Rousseau is at heart the favorite of 
the world because he was such a beast, with all his talent. 

When the world is driven to tears and prayers by Schiller 
it hugs itself to remember that he could not write a line with- 
out the smell of rotten apples near, and that when he died 
there was not enough money in his desk to pay his burial. 
They make him smaller, closer, less divine, the apples and the 
pauper’s coffin. 

Etoile kept no rotten apples by her, and the world snified 
in vain. 

Had she worn men’s clothes, travelled with a married duke, 
and had a caprice for a drunken painter, no doubt the world 
would have better understood her genius. As it was, it felt 
exasperated and thought her ostentatious. 

After all, the innocence of a woman is no amusement what- 
ever to anybody. It only gives nothing to be said about her. 
In any case, whenever the woman is celebrated, the world will 
not put up with nothing. It cuts out the garment of her 


FRIENDSHIP. 29 

history to its own fancy. It is like the great tailor ; it knows 
better than she does what she ought to wear. 

Etoile rose and strolled through the courts and galleries of 
the Vatican, unconscious, or indifferent, of the babble that 
went on concerning her. 

Society saw her servant and the big dog. Tsar, sitting out- 
side with the Swiss Guard. It was almost inclined to think 
there must be something wrong with a cardinal. What a 
nasty savage-looking creature that dog was ! 

At noon she went back to her hotel, found a few cards 
awaiting her, and at two o’clock was seen to be driving with 
the Princess Vera von Kegonwalde, an ambassadress and a 
wit. 

Princess von Kegonwalde — or Princess Vera, as her friends 
called her by her pretty girlish title — was an Austrian by 
birth, and the wife of a Minister of another great Power, not 
Austrian. She was one of the loveliest women that ever 
brightened a court ; she had a face like the Cenci, a walk like 
a young Diana’s, a smile like a child’s, a grace like a flower’s, 
eyes like a fawn’s, fancies like a poet’s, and a form that Titian 
would have given to Venus. She had beautiful children, that 
clung round her in Correggio-like groups; and she always 
looked like a picture, whether shining in velvet and cloth of 
gold in a throne-room, or straying in a linen dress through 
starlit myrtles on Italian hills. Princess Vera was a great 
social power ; and when Society saw Etoile in her carriage it 
began to think that probably after all the paragraph was quite 
true : it began to recollect that it had always heard that this 
great artist’s lungs were not very strong. And what a beauti- 
ful dog was the boar-hound ! Dear fellow, what was his 
name? 

Mrs. Henry V. Clams, on the contrary, as she saw the Ke- 
gonwalde carriage sweep by, said that it was right-down pre- 
posterous, and she didn’t care who heard her. 

Mrs. Henry V. Clams had passed the years of her youth in 
a Far West saw-mill, in sewing-bees, washing-bees, black- 
berrying, and chapel-going, in the middle of a clearing, a good 
five hundred miles from any township; and she had, now that 
youth was fled from her, bloomed into an Elegante in Europe, 
thanks to marvellous dresses, unlimited open house, politic 
lovers, and her husband’s dollars, which were many. 


30 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Still, as an iUgante^ Mrs. Henry V. Clams never felt quite 
sure of her footing, and the night before, on the Pincio, at the 
sight of Etoile in dusky olive-hued velvet, entirely unorna- 
mented, she had had an uneasy conviction that she herself 
had too many buttons, too many colors, too many fringes, and 
had a bonnet too much like a firework, and that her Paris 
deity had been faithless to her and had arrayed her in raiment 
only fit for the “ half-world,” and the feeling rankled in her 
and made her say, “ Preposterous !” snappishly, though she 
was a good-natured woman in the main. 

Mrs. Henry V. Clams’s countrywomen are received at all 
the courts of Europe with no better qualification, very often, 
than that nobody does know where they come from ; and, did 
any ill-judged inquisitor seek to know, his investigations would 
very often lead him into many unsavory dens of the Bowery 
and drinking-shops of “ Frisco,” into the shanty of many a 
ticket-of-leave man and the pawn-shop of many a German 
Jew. 

But it is a question that Mrs. Henry V. Clams and her 
countrywomen are very fond of asking ; and indeed, apropos 
of their own countrywomen, they will always tell you with 
the utmost frankness that Mrs. Phineas B. Williams once 
sold hot potatoes, and Mrs. Heloise W. Dobbs shot her first 
husband in St. Louis, and Miss Anastasia B. Spyrle, betrothed 
to Prince Volterra, danced in tights throughout the States, or 
any other biographical trifle of the sort, with an impartiality 
scorning national bias. 

“ Nobody can’t say where she came from,” said Mrs. Henry 
Y. Clams, drawing herself out a glass of curayoa from a little 
barrel of baccarat glass in her own drawing-room. It was her 
day to receive. 

“ Nobody can’t say where she came from,” reiterated Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams, with a kind of triumph. 

“ Who wants to know where artists come from? I don’t,” 
said Lady Joan Challoner, with a fine sentiment worthy of a 
great patron of the arts, which she was. 

“ When they stick to being artists, of course not,” said Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams. “ You don’t see ’em then, and have no 
call to speak to ’em ; but to think as Princess Vera, who, I’m 
sure, looks as if angels and empresses weren’t good enough to 
black her shoes ” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


31 


“ Princess Vera’s art-mad,” said the Lady Joan. “ I love 
art myself, as you know, but still there are bounds to every- 
thing. Well, anyhow I must know her, so I’m glad Princess 
Vera will keep me in countenance. lo, we ought to be going. 
What are you looking at there? Oh, a photograph of 
Etoile.” 

The Prince loris laid aside an album marked CeUhrith^ 
with a backward glance at the page he had opened it at, where 
he saw a mere profile like a white cameo on a dark ground, 
and the letters “ Etoile” underneath it. 

“ Can one buy those portraits, madame?” he asked of his 
hostess as he hastened to follow the Lady Joan. 

“ Why, my ! yes. That one’s five francs. I think it’s one 
of Goupil’s,” said Mrs. Henry V. Clams. “ But it isn’t much 
to look at : that one of Judic’s, now, or Croisette’s ” 

But it was not Judic or Croisette that was in his fancy. 

“ Come along. Take Spit,” said the Lady Joan, sharply, 
and threw a small blue Skye dog into his arms as they de- 
scended the broad Aubusson-covered staircase of the Ameri- 
can’s magnificent abode. 

“ That woman up-stairs was quite right : it is preposterous,” 
she continued. “ But I thought I wouldn’t say sO, as we 
must know her now. Where are my furs ? Take care.” 

The Prince loris, when in the streets, took advantage of a 
moment when the Lady Joan was engrossed in a shop in the 
Condotti, cheapening a piece of china, to go across to Sulcipi’s 
and order a photograph from Goupil’s to be got for him. 

The shopman answered with alacrity that he had one al- 
ready. “ In fact, we have several. Excellence. She is here, 
you know, and that always creates a demand,” he said, drop- 
ping his voice. 

loris bought the portrait, and slipped it inside his sable- 
lined coat. 

“ Where have you been, lo ? I missed you a moment ago,” 
said the Lady Joan, angrily, having failed to cheapen the 
china, and feeling cross accordingly. 

“ I went to look if it rained. I was afraid you would get 
wet,” he answered, simply, and restored the serenity to her 
brows by buying the bowl for her. 

It was a really charming piece of old Nankin. 

“ Etoile !” He said the word again to himself as he left 


32 


FRIENDSHIP. 


his friend in her anteroom happy with her bowl, and went to 
his own house to dress for dinner. The name had a fascina- 
tion for him. He looked at the photograph by the light of 
the lamps as he walked, and when he reached his own house 
put it away in a secret drawer. He had here and there a 
secret drawer of which the Lady Joan did not possess the 
secret. 

The subject of his thoughts, and of the portrait, had been 
called Etoile as long as she could remember, — the peasant- 
folks calling her so because in her childhood she ran so fast, 
and her long fair hair streamed after her so far, that she 
looked like a shooting star as she flew by them in the summer 
nights in green Ardennes. 

To the world in general the name seemed strange, suspici- 
ous, uncomfortable, indicative of that string of asterisks on a 
page which replaces what is too shocking to be printed. But 
to her it had all the old familiar charm of a sound that bears 
all childhood in it. 

The first thing that she could remember was a sunny vil- 
lage in the woods on the banks of the bright Meuse water, in 
the heart of that sweet green country of Jaques and Rosalind 
which, for some things, has no equal upon earth. 

Few places on the earth are lovelier than the province 
through which the bright Meuse wanders, and the first mem- 
ories of Etoile were of its glancing waters, its wooded hills, its 
rich grass-meadows, its noble forest trees, its gabled houses, 
gray and black with time, its broad yellow roads, leading west- 
ward to France and eastward to the Rhine. There are a 
breadth, a graciousness, a fresh and fragrant verdure in all 
this country not to be surpassed in charm ; it is unworn and 
unspoilt; and although under its leafy woods the wheel of 
the gambler turns, and by its limpid springs the tired hypo- 
chondriac drinks, still there is much of it that neither gambler 
nor hypochondriac ever sees, and that is solitary as Suabian 
or Pennine Alp, and radiant with a brightness all its own. 

The beautiful rapid river, foaming by mill and weir, and 
the hay-fields, with their grand elms and walnuts, and the 
high hills where the pines grew, and the one little sunny paved 
street, with the village fountain at the end, where the women 
gossiped and the big belled horses drank, — these were the first 
things on which the eyes of Etoile had opened, and made the 


FRIENDSHIP. 


33 


first pictures that her mind remembered. A brown-frocked 
monk, a gray-frocked nun, a cowherd with his cattle, a wagon 
with its team, a group of women with their burden of linen 
going to the washing-places in the river, — these were all that 
passed up and down the hilly road between the double row of 
tall bird-filled aspens ; the little place was sunny, sleepy, very 
still, but it was lovely, bosomed deep in fragrant woods, and 
watered by the Meuse. 

And then what a world of wonders lay around ! — the prim- 
roses, the blue jays, the leaping trout, the passing boats, the 
foxes that stole out almost familiarly, the squirrel swinging in 
the nut thickets of the hills, the charcoal-burners coming 
down rough and black to tell tales of the bears and wolves 
high up above, the great Flemish cart-horses walking solemnly 
in state caparison outward on the highroads to France or 
Prussia ; the red lurid glow far away in the evening sky, 
which told where the iron-blasters of stern, fierce Liege were 
at work, — these were wonders enough for a thousand years, 
or at least for a young child to think them so. 

Etoile thought so, and her childhood went by like a fairy- 
tale told by a soft voice on a summer day. 

The house she lived in was very old, and had those charm- 
ing conceits, those rich shadows, that depth of shade, that play 
of light, that variety, and that character which seem given to 
a dwelling-place in ages when men asked nothing better of 
their God than to live where their fathers had lived, and 
leave the old roof-tree to their children’s children. 

The thing built yesterday is a caravansary : I lodge in it 
to-day, and you to-morrow : in an old house only can be made 
a home, where the blessings of the dead have rested and the 
memories of perfect faiths and lofty passions still abide. 

This house stood in a green old shady garden, and at the 
end of the garden the trees hung over the beautiful river. 
Etoile used to think that in just such a garden must have 
passed the long slumbers of the Sleeping Beauty. All happy 
childhood is like an April morning, but hers was beyond most 
children’s- happy by reason of its simplicity, its unclouded 
peace, and the fair, gay, shapeless dreams that were with it 
always, like light golden clouds about the sun. 

, There were sadness and mystery near, but neither was 
allowed to touch her. She only knew peace and joy. If she 

B* 


34 


FRIENDSHIP. 


had been told that she had dropped from the stars on a mid- 
summer night, she would have believed it quite easily : no 
healthy child’s life will ever wonder whence it comes or 
whither it drifts. It is enough for it that it is. 

This is the one felicity that the innocence of infancy and the 
trance of passion share in common. The immediate moment 
is the heaven alike of the child and of the lover. 

She was very happy always in this, her green birth-country, 
by the river-side. 

But she was never happier than when she went out of the 
sweet sumiHer sunshine, from the murmur of the street foun- 
tain, and from the smell of the blossoming orchards, into the 
quiet dusky den that was her study, and bent her curls over 
the ponderous tomes and the intricate exercises with which 
her tutors delighted in trying her patience and her powers. 

Out of doors she was the merest child, happy in all a child’s 
pleasure of new-born days and new-found berries and new- 
made cakes, of the old swing in the sycamore, and the first 
swallow, that showed summer, and the promise of a long day 
in the woods to bring home violets, or any other of the many 
simple things which made her childhood beautiful. 

She knew the whereabouts of every rare wild fiower ; she 
knew every bird that haunted the woods or the streams ; she 
was friends with all the peasant- folk, and would find their stray 
sheep for them and tame the dogs they were afraid of; she 
loved the wind and the wild weather as she loved the heat 
that uncurled the carnation buds and the still moonshine when 
the nightingales sang in the orchards ; she was not dismayed 
if evening fell as she ran alone down a lone hillside, or if she 
bore down through the swift wild rain like a little white boat 
through a surging sea ; she had the love of nature of a G-er- 
man, and the unconsciousness that she loved it of a Greek. 

“ Tu es foUe” said her old teacher to her because she 
laughed and cried for joy to see the first primrose break out 
of the bleak brown earth, and kneeled down and kissed the 
flower, and told it how glad the birds would be, and would not 
to have saved her life have taken it away from its shelter of 
green leaves. “ Tu es folle^^ said the old teacher : it is what 
the world always says to the poet. 

In the forests on the Meuse Biver there lived an old man 
who did not tell her she was foolish. He was a German, who 


FRIENDSHIP. 


35 


had been a noted artist in his day, until paralysis of his right 
arm by some accident had put an end to his career and his 
hopes of fame. He was sad and alone, was harsh of temper 
and taciturn, but he took a fancy to this child who was always 
out of doors trying to learn the secrets of the clouds’ move- 
ments and the waters’ hues, and he guided aright her passion- 
ate instincts towards the arts. By the time she was fifteen 
she had created things that the old master thought more mar- 
vellous than he would confess to her. She painted all the day 
in the open air, on the hills and by the torrents ; she studied all 
the evenings and half the night. She was perfectly happy. 

There was another world, of course, where the hay-wagons 
went and the barges down the river; but she wanted no 
other. 

Now and then there would come to the black-and-white 
house on the river a person for whom the ways of the house 
were changed, and who was always whispered of in words of 
awe by the village people. He would kiss her carelessly, bid 
her do a problem or write a poem, stay a few days, and go. 
She was told that he was her father, — the Count Raoul 
d’Avesnes. 

In the old fighting days the Counts d’Avesnes had been a 
fierce and mighty race, reigning in lofty regions of the wild 
Ardennes, Catholics always, and warriors rather than cour- 
tiers. Little by little, in strife and conspiracy and inter- 
necine wars, they had lost their lands and greatness, until little 
save their traditions were left in modern times. This, their 
sole living representative, was a man of many ambitions, of 
no achievement. A political gamester, a political conspirator, 
his life was spent in the treacherous seas of political intrigue, 
and he at the last perished in their whirlpool. Little was known 
of him, — by his daughter almost nothing. He had broken 
his wife’s heart and spent her money. His own death was 
mysterious, like his life. He passed away and made no sign. 

There is so much mystery in this world, only people who 
lead humdrum lives will not believe it. 

It is a great misfortune to be born to a romantic history. 
The humdrum always think that you are lying. In real truth 
romance is common in life, commoner, perhaps, than the com- 
monplace. But the commonplace always looks more natural. 

In nature there are millions of gorgeous hues to a scarcity of 


36 


FRIENDSHIP. 


neutral tints ; yet the pictures that are painted in sombre semi- 
tones and have no one positive color in them are always pro- 
nounced the nearest to nature. When a painter sets his 
palette he dares not approach the gold of the sunset and dawn 
or the flame of the pomegranate and poppy. Etoile’s short 
story had this gold and red in it, and so no one believed in 
it any more than they do in the life-likeness of Turner’s 
Hesperides. 

She, a happy and thoughtful child, lived in the little Ar- 
dennes village with her mother’s mother and her two old 
servants, and knew nothing of all this heritage of wonder and 
of woe. Occasionally the wonderful person who was called 
her father came and brought a wonderful breath of the outer 
air with him. That was all she knew. 

One day his shadow passed for the last time up the sunny 
street between the aisles of aspen, and was seen no more there 
ever after, and his letters ceased, and silence fell upon his fate ; 
and in time they came to know that he was dead and she was 
the last that lived of the once famous race of the Counts 
d’Avesnes. 

It scarcely seemed strange to her, — she had always known 
so little. 

He had been a black bead in the golden rosary of her 
happy childhood : she barely missed it when it dropped. 

In after-years people would never believe that Etoile, beyond 
the fact of the patrician name she bore, had known so little ; 
they forgot how completely natural and matter-of-course the 
strangest circumstances seem to one who has been rocked in 
them, as it were, in a cradle from birth upward. 

Her father had come and gone, come and gone, as comets 
do. He ceased to come ; it did not seem strange. 

She studied in the big books, and strayed about in the 
chestnut woods and orchards, and lived in her own fancies 
more than in anything around her. Vague desires would oft- 
times touch her, as she used to stand on the brow of the 
reaped fields and watch the sun go down, red and beautiful 
against the dusky masses of the far-off woods. But they were 
desires whose wings were still folded, — like those of fledgling 
birds, — that flutter a little way through the green leaves and 
then are frightened at their dreams of flight. 

For the rest, her grandmother and the old servants took all 


FRIENDSHIP. 37 

care of things bodily and temporal. Etoile was free to think 
and dream and study. 

The treasures of scholarship are sweet to all who open them. 
But they are perhaps sweetest of all to a girl that has been 
led both by habit and by nature to seek them. 

The soul of a girl, whilst passions sleep, desires are un- 
known, and self-consciousness lies unawakened, can lose itself 
in the impersonal as no male student can. The mightiness 
and beauty of past ages become wonderful and all-sufficient 
to it, as they can never do to a youth beset by the stinging 
fires of impending manhood. The very element of faith and 
of imagination, hereafter its weakness, becomes the strength 
of the girl-scholar. The very abandonment of self, which 
later on will fling her to Sappho’s death or mure her in the 
cell of Helo’ise, will make her find a cloudless and all-absorb- 
ing happiness in the meditations of great minds, in the myths 
of heroic ages, in the delicate intricacies of language, and in 
the immeasurable majesties of thought. The evil inseparable 
from all knowledge will pass by her unfelt ; the greatness only 
attainable by knowledge will lend her perfect and abiding 
joys. ^ 

Whilst they were only scholars, be sure that Sappho and 
H41oise were calmer and more glad than any other women : 
it was when they looked up from the written page to the 
human face that their woes surpassed all others’, — because 
beyond all others’ was their loss. 

A year after the tidings of the Comte d’ Avesnes’ death had 
come to the Ardennes, her grandmother, reflecting that at her 
death the child would be solitary, with a slender patrimony 
and a name whose past nobility was of no present use, resolved 
to sacrifice her own peace and move to a great city. 

They went to Paris, leaving the green Meuse waters and 
those bright woodland villages that lie out of the beaten 
track and are so still and fresh and charming. Etoile sobbed 
bitterly : yet she was full of ecstatic wonder and hope. She 
forgot that thousands have had such hope before her, and had 
only perished miserably in the vast press of life. If youth 
did not thus forget, maturity would have no fame to record. 

They made their home in a nook of old Paris within sight 
of the trees of Luxembourg. A tumult of great ideas and 
vague ambitions was in the mind of the child, who had studied 

4 


38 


FRIENDSHIP. 


more than many men, and had the poetry of many nations all 
alive within her. 

In the city of pleasure Etoile uninterruptedly pursued 
both art and study. Friends they had but few ; those few 
were of the proud impoverished families of a nobility that 
had nothing left except its traditions of honor ; and such as 
these thought the pursuit of art a degradation. 

One day Etoile, however, made a friend of her own. 
Chances brought her across the path of an old man whose 
name was very glorious to her, — a great master whose genius 
had been nurtured amidst the mighty storms of the First Em- 
pire. The old man looked long in silence at her, the harsh 
lines of his face softening and changing ; then he turned to 
her and uncovered his white head. 

“ My sun has long set,” he said : “ I rejoice to see yours 
rise.” 

The word of David Israels was still a law in Paris and all 
the worlds of art. He kept her secret and sent her first 
picture to the Salon himself 

“ One of my pupils,” was all he would say when questioned 
as to the painter. 

The picture was only the study of a gleaner returning by 
sunset over naked fields ; but it had an instant and unques- 
tioned success. It was followed by greater and stronger works, 
signed “ Etoile.” 

The pictures were for some few years always thought to be 
the creations of a man, were treated as such ; and when the 
rumor was first current that the painter was a woman, — a girl, 
— the great world of Paris laughed aloud in derision and utter 
disbelief. 

Their force, their depth of tone, their anatomical accuracy, 
and above all their profound melancholy, made it impossible ; 
so they said. 

Nevertheless the world, which has lived to see many impos- 
sible things pass into the limbo of incontestable facts, lived to 
see this pass also. 

“ It is time they should know the truth,” said David Israels, 
and told it. Etoile regretted that it should be told : to the 
pure ambitions of the true artist creation is paradise, but the 
praise of the crowd seems profanity. 

But David Israels had not had his own way unresisted for 


FRIENDSHIP. 39 

two-thirds of a century to consider such a trifle as any one’s 
personal desires. 

He made the truth known, and within a year or two she 
sprang at once into the fierce light that beats upon a throne, 
— the contested and bitterly-begrudged throne of genius. 

David Israels lived long enough to see her triumphs, — not 
long enough to protect her from the dark shadows that slink 
in the path of all triumphs. Etoile became a name on the 
tongues of all Paris, and so on all the tongues of the world. 
She had a fame as great and as pure as is possible in this age, 
when fame is too often awarded by the mere screams of the 
vulgar. To her house in the Paris winters came many of the 
greatest men of her time. She influenced them much more 
than they influenced her. She had a life that was brilliant 
and rich in all fruits of the intellect. 

As recreations of her leisure, she wrote a comedy in verse 
which had a tumultuous success on a great stage, and some 
poems were printed in great reviews, all signed “Etoile.” 
“ She has all the talents,” said the world, angrily. If she 
had only had all the vices too, the world would not, perhaps, 
have minded so much. 

Unfortunately for her reputation, no one could find out 
that she had as much as one vice. Few women could boast 
of being her friend, but no man could boast of being her 
lover. 

Ten years had now gone by since she left the Meuse River ; 
they had been ten years of brilliancy, if not of happiness. 
G-enius is seldom happy, — except in its dreams or the first 
hours of its love. 

With a woman, the vulgarity that lies in public adulation 
is apt to nauseate ; at least if she be so little of a woman that 
she is not vain, and so much of one that she cares for privacy. 
For the fame of our age is not glory, but notoriety ; and noto- 
riety is to a woman like the bull to Pasiphae : whilst it 
caresses it crushes. 

Fame brought Etoile its sweet and bitter fruits together. 

“ That is Etoile,” said every one when she passed by. 
People who creep by in obscurity think this notice from man- 
kind must be paradise. 

All at once she grew tired of the brilliant success that sur- 
rounded her ; it seemed tame, stupid, a twice-told tale. “ Oh, 


40 


FRIENDSHIP. 


old world, have you nothing better?” she said, thanklessly, to 
the world which had been too prodigal of its laurels to her. 

She lost zest in it all. A cough settled on her lungs. 
When her physicians bade her rest and go to Italy, she was 
glad. 

They said she had caught cold from working in clay. She 
had had that desire to create something excellent in sculpture 
which comes to most true painters ; but her malady was not 
due to cold or clay : it was rather the fatal revenge entailed 
on any mortal who has exiled the passions and the affections, 
and who will sicken for them unconsciously : the most splen- 
did structure of the intellect will always have this danger at 
its base. 


CHAPTER V. 

On the night when the Prince loris took the little three- 
cornered note of his friend to the Comtesse d’Avesnes the 
note was carried up-stairs to a large salon on the first floor, of 
which the windows were standing open, giving to view the 
masses of trees on the Pincio and the Medici gardens and the 
brilliant stars of a winter’s night. The naked and tawdry 
splendor of a hotel apartment was redeemed by masses of 
flowers that the present occupants of it had brought there, — 
pale violets, snowy camellias, and early narcissi, born under 
glass, and showing their tender heads coyly, as if cold. 

Against one of the open casements leaned Etoile, wrapped 
in her furs, — for the night was chilly, — looking at the stars 
of Orion, which had arisen above the dark lines of the ilex- 
trees, and listening to the fall of the fountain-water in the 
square below. 

She was fair of skin, and in form slender and supple, from 
living much out of doors and taking much exercise in the 
saddle and on foot ; she had bright-hued hair that was lifted 
a little from her forehead, and eyes like the eyes of the boyish 
portrait of Shelley ; her velvet skirts fell to her feet in the 
simple undulating folds that Leonardo da Vinci loved to draw. 
People were vaguely disappointed when they saw her : they 


FRIENDSHIP. 


41 


would have liked her better in a man’s coat, with her hair cut 
short, and generally odd and untidy-looking. An artist that 
you might by accident mistake for a duchess is annoying. 

“ What are you thinking of, Etoile ?” said her companion, 
who was that wonderfully beautiful woman, brilliant as a 
pomegranate-flower or a sapphire, who was at once Dorotea 
Coronis and the wife of the Due de Santorin. 

“ I believe I was thinking of Actea.” 

From the hotel she could see the dark masses of the trees 
on the Pincio, and the round dome of the church raised to lay 
the unholy spirit of Nero to rest. 

“ Poor Actea ! The slave-girl redeems the age she lived 
in ” 

“ E-ich Actea I happy Actea !” said Dorotea Coronis, with 
a sigh. “ Her beast was god to her. She never saw him 
as he was. No doubt she thought him too a great artist and 
a perfect poet. Love is blind.” 

“ Not the highest love, surely.” 

“What do you know about it? You love nothing but 
your art.” 

“ That is Voightel’s complaint.” 

“ Voightel is quite right. Why have you never cared for 
any man, Etoile ?” 

“ Cared ? Men are so admirable as friends ; when they 
speak of warmer things than friendship they weary or they 
revolt me ; I lose my regard for them and my patience with 
them. It is hard to give a reason for these things.” 

“ You are fortunate to be so cold.” 

“ Is it coldness ? And is it fortunate ? I am not so certain.” 

“ Whatever it is, it makes you many foes. You seem to say 
to men, ‘ You are too stupid to succeed,’ and to women, ‘ I am 
stronger than you.’ ” 

“ I do not mean to say anything of the kind. It is true 
most people tire me. There is so little profundity in them, 
and one reads them so soon. A new acquaintance is like a 
new novel : you open it with expectation, but what you find 
there seldom makes you care to take it off the shelf a second 
time.” 

“I am glad I am an old friend.” 

Etoile smiled. 

“ Oh, old friends are our Homers and Horaces, our Shak- 
4 * 


42 


FRIENDSHIP. 


peares and Moli^res : we cannot read them too often, and we 
find something in them to suit all our moods. Why will you 
go away from me, dear Dorotea ?” 

The Duchesse Santorin laughed a little wearily. 

“ My dear ! when M. le Due must have two hundred thou- 
sand francs as his New Year’s etrennes ! You forget I am not 
my own mistress, and the Petersburg engagement was signed 
this time last year.” 

“ I would give him no more. Surely your marriage-con- 
tract protects you a little?” 

“ Entirely. But only so can I purchase his absence. He 
has outraged me in every kind of way, but he has not lost his 
legal rights. He never struck me before witnesses ; and though 
he had mistresses all over Europe he did not bring one under 
the same roof with me. You see he is blameless.” 

The lovely dark face of the great Spanish singer grew weary 
and full of scorn : she rose and walked to and fro the room 
restlessly. 

“ I wish you were not going to Russia,” said her friend, in 
a low tone, leaving the open window. 

The Duchesse Santorin looked up quickly and paused in her 
rapid and passionate walk. 

“ You think I shall meet Fedor. You mistake. He has 
left the Imperial Guard and had himself ordered to the Cau- 
casus by my wish. He is there, and he will be there all 
winter.” 

“ But who will believe that ?” 

“ It does not matter what is believed. It matters what is.” 

“ To ourselves and the God we hope for, — yes.” 

“ And what else matters ? When we are ‘ in the light that 
beats upon a throne’ we are at once condemned unheard ; for 
Envy and Mediocrity sit on the judgment-seat, and when ever 
did they wait for truth ?” 

In brave old Cordova, twenty years before, a tiny child with 
some gitana blood in her had danced the zaronga with twink- 
ling feet whenever a castanet clicked or a tambourine sounded, — 
a child so beautiful that when her father, a picador, lay dying 
in the sand of the bull-ring he kissed her on the eyes and said, 
“ Though I go where I shall see the faces of the children of 
God, there will be no face so fair among them as my Dorotea’s.” 

She was only five years old then, but she never afterwards 


FRIENDSHIP. 


43 


forgot the circle of sand, the stream of blood, the sea of faces, 
the great dead bull, the dying man whose last breath was a 
kiss to her. 

His brethren of the tribe, unasked, took the burden of her, 
shared between them the cost of her small wants, housed her 
safely with good women, and even had her well taught by a 
priest, — or taught, at least, as much as it is ever thought a 
Spanish girl can want to know apart from her lore of fan and 
rosary. The little Dorotea danced in every patio where the 
guitar was sounding and sang in every church where the 
litanies were chanting, — a wild, gay, most lovely child ; proud, 
too, — so proud that the Cordovans would say to one another 
that perhaps the fables were true which had given to the pica- 
dor the blood of an old kingly stock. 

When she was growing a little out of childhood, some one 
travelling through Cordova chanced to see and hear her sing. 

The traveller was an old Jew whose errand in life was to 
find great singers for great theatres. He was an honest man 
and virtuous, though he loved money. He persuaded her pro- 
tectors to sell him. the little Dorotea. He took her away with 
him, and dealt gently with her, training her wonderful powers 
aright, and letting her know and hear nothing to her hurt. 
At sixteen she sang in Italy, at seventeen in Paris. She had 
one of the purest voices that had been ever heard upon the 
stage, and her marvellous beauty and brilliancy made her fame 
even more than her voice. Dorotea Coronis was one of the 
wonders of the world. She had reached as great heights of 
perfection as any singer can, and every note that fell from her 
lovely lips brought a shower of gold. 

Among her countless lovers came the Due de Santorin, 
Pair de France^ with his heart and his couronne in his 
hand, to lay at her feet. For it was well known that, to be 
won, she must be wooed with due honor. After some reluc- 
tance and long refusal she became his wife. His passion for 
herself was hot but brief ; his passion for her golden harvests 
lasted. 

The pride in her which the people of Cordova had seen in 
the baby dancing the zaronga in their courts and gardens 
made the dignity and ancientness of his name allure her. 
She had no love for him, but neither had she any dislike. 
Those about her urged and persuaded her. 


44 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ I do not care for you, but you never shall be ashamed of 
me,” she said to him. 

He swore gratitude and devotion. He did not keep his 
word, but she kept hers. 

She had now been Huchesse de Santorin for some years, 
singing in all the cities of Europe to supply his demands, and 
with a right to a tabouret at the court of France whenever 
court of France there might be. The contrast sometimes 
made her laugh as she had used to laugh above her tambour- 
ine in the patios of old Cordova, only not with the same mirth. 
For five years they had been virtually separated, though still 
nominally of good accord. She had kept her word to him : 
she had been faithful. But of course the world did not 
think so. 

Men were in love with her wherever her beautifdl gazelle- 
like eyes rested, wherever her pure lark -like voice penetrated. 
The world knew very well that some of these, — oh, yes, of 
coui*se ; and the world was inclined to pity the Hue de 
Santorin. 

“ She was a gitana, you know, — a gypsy, — a little bare- 
legged, brazen thing, telling fortunes and rolling in the mud,” 
said the world feminine, jealous of that sovereign grace and 
that incomparable art which heaven had given to Horotea 
Coronis. 

Meanwhile there were many who loved and honored her, 
and among them was Etoile. 

They had become friends at the house of a famous Min- 
ister one night in Paris, after a representation of the “ Flauto 
Magico,” and their friendship had endured. 

“ But the Caucasus,” said Etoile this evening, — “ the Cau- 
casus is not so very far that men cannot come back from it. 
Are you sure that Count Souroff ” 

“ Will do what I wish him? Yes.” 

“ No ; I meant rather to ask you of your own strength. 
When you are in his own country, when you know him amidst 
a half-savage people, in sickness and peril, wounded even, per- 
haps, — can you be sure that you will not yourself recall him.” 

“Yes, I am sure. Because my resolve is for his sake, not 
my own. Listen, Etoile.” 

She paused in her feverish movements to and fro the great 
chamber and stood before her friend. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


45 


“ A woman who thinks for herself is weak, but the woman 
who thinks for another is strong. I will not let Fedor Sou- 
roff be my lover because I adore him with all my heart, all my 
soul, all my life. I am a Spanish woman if I am anything ; 
I have fire, not water, in my veins ; I have no duties to- 
wards my husband, because he has insulted me, robbed me, 
outraged me, beaten me, and told me a hundred times a year 
that I am only his bank, which he honors only too much by 
plunging his hand into it to seize its gold, — only his mechani- 
cal nightingale, of which he keeps the key, with the title to 
wind it up and set it singing when he wills, or break it if it 
fail to sing. And yet — yet I will not be what they say I am 
to the man whom I worship, and who thinks holy the very 
stones or sand that feel my feet, and gives to me the noblest, 
tendercst, most loyal love that was ever given to a woman for 
her joy and pain. I will not, — for his sake ” 

“ For his ?” 

“ For his. You have seen him so little, else you would 
know why without asking. In the first place, Santorin would 
shoot him dead. Santorin is base, but not so base as to sink 
to the cocu content of the modern world ; and Fedor would 
let Santorin shoot him. That would be what he would call 
only just. But this is the least thing. Fedor would gladly 
die so to purchase one hour with me. What would be far 
worse for him would be to live. What man is more wretched 
on earth than the bond-slave of another man’s wife ? Fedor 
is young ; he has a great name, he comes of a great fiimily, 
who adore him ; he is a fearless and devoted soldier. I will 
not ruin him, — I will not. He would break his career for 
me ; he would incur exile, confiscation, even the shame of a 
deserter, for me ; yes, and adore me the more because I 
doomed him to them. I will not take his sacrifice. My 
love, my love ! — he is but mortal. He will not love forever 
thus ; not when love is but another name for disappointment. 
Men are not like us. In time he will forget me ; he will be 
free ; he will be happy.” 

She ceased suddenly; a convulsion of violent weeping 
passed through her ; she threw herself prostrate on a couch 
and buried her beautiful head in her hands. 

Etoile looked at her with tears in her own eyes ; she fore- 
bore to speak ; she knew that all the passionate, proud, and 


46 


FRIENDSHIP. 


vehement nature of Dorotea Coronis was centred in this great 
passion, whose temptations it yet had strength to resist. 

The windows were open, and the stars shone in the dark ; 
the sound of the fountains below came on the silence with the 
dull rumbling of the night traffic of Rome ; the air was sweet 
and heavy with the smell orf forced heliotrope with which they 
had filled a large bowl on a marble table. 

“ To love like that !” thought Etoile. “ It must be worth 
even all that pain.” 

And for the first time in her life she felt solitary. 

At that moment the servant brought her the note from the 
Casa Challoner and a bouquet of white flowers, lilies of the 
valley and camellias, which the Prince loris had purchased in 
the flower-shop of the Via Condotti as he passed in the 
moonlight, and sent up with his own card, on one of those 
unthinking impulses which sometimes imperilled all his pm- 
dence. 

“ What sweet lilies !” said Etoile, and forsook the stars for 
them, bending her face over their fragrance. Flowers were 
her earliest loves, and had never been displaced in her afiec- 
tions. Then she opened the Lady Joan’s letter. 

A few evenings before, in Paris, Voightel, shrewdest, 
keenest, and most merciless of wits and men, had been to bid 
her farewell. 

“ Go and see Archie’s daughter, since he wishes it ; go and 
see my Lady Joan,” had said the great A^oightel, traveller, 
philologist, past-master in all sciences and all tongues, stand- 
ing on her hearth, and glowering through his green spectacles 
and his grizzled beard till he looked like a magnified and 
cynical tom-cat, “ I have often talked to Joan of you. What 
is she like ? Not a whit like Archie, but a handsome woman, 
and a clever woman in her way, which is not your way. 
Merim4e calls her his pMroleiise. It is inexact. PHroleiises 
burn with no idea of ultimate booty ; she would never waste 
her oil so. Cleopatra crossed with Dame du Comptoir were 
nearer, I think. I admire her very much. I always know 
she is lying, and yet I am always pleased when she lies to 
please me. How contemptible ! But all men are weak. I 
am inclined to respect women who live every hour of their 
lives. She does. You do not. You dream too much ever 
to live very vividly, unless you ever fall in love. I do so wish 


FRIENDSHIP. 


47 


you would. It would make you so many friends. Men dis- 
like a woman who will not be wooed. Believe that, my dis- 
dainful Etoile, who will be wooed by nobody. When a woman 
is ‘ kind’ to various men, each favored mortal is bound in 
honor to arm cap-d-pU and swear she never was ‘ kind ’ to 
anybody. AVhereas, when she repulses and rebutfs them all 
around as you do, her lovers become her enemies, and will be 
more than human if they do not take her character away, out 
of the sincerity of their conviction that somebody must have 
been beforehand with them. Reasoning by analogy, I have 
very little doubt that Faustina was a wife of remarkable 
purity, and St. Agnes and St. Agatha very little better than 
they should have been. Go and see our dear Joan. She is a 
fagot of contradictions ; extraordinarily ignorant, but natur- 
ally intelligent ; audacious, yet timid ; a bully, but a coward ; 
■full of hot passions, but with cold fits of prudence. Had she 
your talent the world would have heard of her. As it is, she 
only enjoys herself. Perhaps the better part. Fame is a cone 
of smoke. Enjoyment is a loaf of sugar. I am not sure 
what she is doing in Home, but I am quite sure she is in 
mischief, and quite sure she is making money. When the 
moon on the Forum has filled your brain with schwarmerei^ go 
and see Joan. She is an admirable tonic for all poets. She 
will be the Prose of Borne for you. You will want prose 
there.” 


CHAPTER YL 

At eight o’clock on the 6th of December, Etoile Comtesse 
d’Avesnes went up the many stairs of the Casa Challoner, to 
see for the first time the woman who was to be to her the 
Prose of Rome. 

She herself was tired, and had little color; she wore no 
jewels, and had only a knot of pale yellow tea-roses at her 
breast; her dress trailed softly, it was made up of black 
Chantilly laces and pale maize hues, and the deftest hands of 
Paris had cast the easy and simple grace of it together. 

She went carelessly, indifferently, wondering if she should 
like these people as much as she liked Lord Archie, — went 


48 


FRIENDSHIP. 


to her fate as every one does, unwitting that in the common- 
place passage of the hours Destiny was striking. 

As she entered the anteroom and laid aside her furs, she 
heard a voice singing a ritornello of the Roman populace, to 
the deep dulcet chords of a mandoline. 

As her name was announced, the voice ceased, and from 
between two curtains of Oriental silk, that shaded the inner 
doorway, there advanced, with outstretched hands, the singer, 
clad in black velvet, with a little collar of diamond stars at 
her throat, which sparkled as she moved. She had a classic 
head, fitly shaped for a bust of Athene, an Egyptian profile, 
brilliant eyes, green by day, black by night, thick eyebrows, 
and a cordial smile, that showed very white and even teeth. 

“ How charmed I am ! At last we meet ! How many 
many times I have tried to see you in Paris and Brussels !” 
cried the Lady Joan, with eager welcome, and with honest 
warmth. 

“ Your father’s daughter can be nothing but my friend,” 
answered her new acquaintance, with sincerity. 

Lady Joan, her guitar still in one hand, led her guest with 
animated and eager compliment to the hearth, pushed a low 
chair nearer the wood fire, said some pretty words of her own 
father and of their dear old Voightel, asked after other friends 
they had in common, spoke of the weather, and then, as by a 
mere careless after-thought, or accident, turned suddenly and 
presented a person who had all the while been standing close 
by, erect, calm, and unnoticed, like a lord in waiting beside a 
throne. 

“ Prince loris — the Comtesse d’Avesnes. loris is a great 
friend of my husband’s, — his dearest friend, indeed. Oh, of 
course he has heard of you. Who has not ? Only, of course, 
too, he knows you best as Etoile. We all do that. It is such 
a charming name !” 

The Prince loris looked like a picture, and bowed like a 
courtier, and, leaning his arm on the mantel-shelf, began to 
speak graceful nothings, in his melodious voiee. 

At that moment there entered, a little hurriedly, like an 
actor not on the stage in time for his cue, the gentleman with 
a Scotch face and a German manner, whom Lady Joan, with 
a little frown on her darkling brows, presented as Mr. Chal- 
loner. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


49 


Mr. Challoner, the excellence of whose countenance was 
its unalterability under all circumstances whatever, stared 
through his eyeglass, bent himself stiffly, and in solemn 
phrase assured his guest of the supreme honor that he felt 
she had done to his threshold. 

Immediately upon him there followed another of his guests, 
Mrs. Henry V. Clams, gorgeous in a gown that imprisoned 
her so tightly that it only permitted of the garb of a circus- 
rider underneath it, and weighty with a perfect G-olconda of 
rubies. 

“No stones on her! — my word, and she must have got 
lots 1” reflected Mrs. Henry V. Clams, staring at the tea-roses 
of Etoile, and settling in her own mind that artists were the 
most disappointing people to look at, except princes, that ever 
she saw. She was accompanied by the Marquis de Fonte- 
branda, a Piedmontese about the court, a fair, graceful, and 
good-looking man, who had trained her in the way she should 
go, and still suffered many things from her love of colors and 
her need of dictionaries. Her husband had been invited, of 
course, but it was understood everywhere that he never came 
anywhere; he had always a cold, or letters in from N’York. 
Fontebranda had trained him as well. 

The other guests arrived, — an English chief justice, famous 
for his wit, a lady known to all Europe as the Marchioness of 
Cardiff, some Italians, some Russians, and, finally, a mature 
pet of the Lady Joan’s, a white-haired and cosmopolitan Eng- 
lishman, by name Silverly Bell, who was a most popular per- 
son at all the English tea-parties of the Continent, for nobody 
sugared your tea more prettily or told you nastier stories of 
your neighbors more sweetly. 

Dinner announced, Fontebranda was allotted to Etoile, Mr. 
Challoner offered his arm to Lady Cardiff, and the hostess went 
in with Mr. Challoner’s dearest friend. 

“What do you think of her, lo?” she murmured in his 
ear. 

“ Pas grand^ chose he murmured back, indifferently, with 
a little shrug of his shoulders. 

The Lady Joan’s gray-green eyes sparkled happily. She 
believed him. 

The dinner was well appointed, quiet, and unpretentious ; 
the dishes were not too numerous, and were all good ; the 
c 6 


50 


FRIENDSHIP. 


flowers were in old Faenza bowls; the china was old white 
and gold Ginori, the glass Venetian, the fruit superb. All 
went well, and there was only one discord, the voice of Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams ; but that is a kind of discord which in the 
present construction of society is to be heard everywhere, from 
mountain-tops to throne-rooms. 

Mrs. Henry V. Clams thought again and again what “ dis- 
appointin’ people” artists were. 

Etoile chanced to say very little. 

Sometimes in society she was very silent, sometimes very 
eloquent. Minds like hers resemble running brooks : they 
reflect what they pass through ; they are still or sparkling, 
dark or radiant, according as they flow over sand or moss, 
under black cloud or sunny sky: the brook is always the 
same ; it is what it mirrors that varies. 

Mrs. Henry V. Clams — who herself was quite independent 
of circumstance or surroundings, and whose torrents of ques- 
tions and bubbles of curiosity and chatter never ceased on any 
occasion, and never had been known to cease, except once at a 
Drawing-room in London, and once at a total eclipse of the 
sun, on both of which occasions she had owned to being “ that 
cowed she was right down mum” — stared at Etoile across the 
table, and said to her next neighbor that “ surety there was 
nothing like clever people for being daft.” 

Her neighbor, being the English chief justice, a very clever 
and merry person himself, assented heartily to the proposition, 
but begged her to reflect. 

“ My dear lady, if talent weren’t a little daft as you say, 
how on earth would the great majority ever be got to stand it 
at all ? Consider the enormous utility of genius looking now 
and then like a fool.” 

Mrs. Henry V. Clams stuffed her mouth with a houchee^ 
and smiled vaguely. She did not understand, and Fonte- 
branda was too far off to be telegraphed to for explanations. 

“ If that be Etoile, why don’t she talk and amuse us ?” 
mused meanwhile, like Mrs. Henry V. Clams, a very different 
person, the Marchioness of Cardiff, whose heart and soul had 
been bequeathed to her unaltered from an ancestress of the 
days of Louis XIV., and who never could see why artists 
wanted Christian burial, or were asked to dinner, or any of 
that sort of thing. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


51 


“ Is that really Etoile, did you say? the Etoile, you know ?” 
she asked of her host. 

“ Yes, yes,” assented Mr. Challoner, not being certain 
whether he ought to be very triumphant over his guest, or 
somewhat ashamed of her. “Dear Lord Archie is fond of 
her, — ^begged us to do what we could : you know his good na- 
ture, — my wife inherits it. Dear Lady Cardiff, do try these 
larded quails.” 

“ She looks a much better bred one than you do, my dear 
sir,” thought her ladyship, withdrawing her eyeglass from 
Etoile to the quails. 

“ You said you liked to meet celebrities, — that it amused 
you,” said her host, with an accent of apology in his voice. 
“ Of course of her great genius there can be no question.” 

“ Of course, of course ! and I am charmed,” said her lady- 
ship, occupied with her first mouthful of a larded quail. “ Tell 
her to come to my Mondays. I’ll tell her myself after dinner. 
She’s very well dressed. Is it Worth?” 

“ Most likely : she is said to be extravagant.” 

“ I am sure she has a right to be. How nice it must be to 
make your own money, and spend it, and never be bothered 
with trustees I Oh, yes. Worth, beyond any doubt. The 
way he ties a bow one never can mistake. And just that tea- 
rose, too ; very pretty, very pretty indeed. What different 
things he gives people he likes, to what he will do for mere 
millionaires like our dear Mrs. Henry V. Clams.” 

Etoile, unconscious of the criticism, ruffled the tea-roses 
among her old lace, divided her few words between Eonte- 
branda and a Count Serge lloublezoff who sat on the other 
side of her, looked often at her hostess, whose bright eyes 
flashed back honest kindly smiles to hers, and, without know- 
ing very well why she did so, watched the man whom Lady 
Joan had installed in the seat of honor. 

He was very tall and slender, with that look of distinction 
which, though not always attendant on a great race, is never 
found outside it ; he had high delicate features, and an oval 
beardless face, a soft olive skin, thoughtful pensive brows, and 
those eyes which at once allure and command women ; he had 
a beautiful voice, infinite grace and softness of manner, and in 
aspect might have stepped down off any canvas of Velasquez 
or Vandyke. Etoile noticed that he was scrupulously alive to 


52 


FRIENDSHIP. 


every want of the Lady Joan’s; he bowed his head in re- 
signed silence whenever she contradicted him, which she did 
twice in every five minutes ; he called her Madame with the 
strictest ceremony, and addressed Mr. Challoner across the 
length of the table as “ mon cher,” with more friendly effu- 
sion than seemed needful, on more occasions than were natural. 
Occasionally he looked across at Etoile herself. 

• His eyes were thoughtful, dreamy, — when he chose, abso- 
lutely unrevealing; they had the drooped languid amorous 
lids and the long dark lashes of his country. Wherever his 
eyes lighted. Lady Joan’s followed and lighted too. 

As he looked he was thinking, as long afterwards he told 
Etoile, — 

“ That woman is half a saint and half a muse. 

“ She has never loved. 

“ She is full of idealities. 

“ She has strong passions, but they sleep. 

“ Her dreams are the enemies of men. 

“ She does not care for the world. 

“ She has been used to her own way, and she has treated 
all men with indifference ; some few with friendship ; none 
with tenderness. 

“ She seems cold ; but I think she is only uninterested. 

“ She is all mind. Her senses have never stirred. She 
does not belong to our world. 

“ She has thoughts that go far away from us. 

She has not enough frivolity to enjoy her own generation. 

“ She has lovely eyes : they say so much without knowing 
that they say anything. 

“ She has beautiful hands. 

“ She is dressed perfectly. 

“ I shall detest her. 

“ Or I shall adore her. 

“ Which of the two ? I do not know. 

“ Perhaps both.” 

So he thought of Etoile, watching her across the table 
whilst he talked with polite attention to his hostess, who 
snapped him short with her curt, sharp, bright humor, and 
seldom allowed him to finish a sentence. 

He looked very much like a grave, slender deer-hound held 
down under a keeper’s leash. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


53 


There was pride in his eyes and high spirit on his aquiline 
features, but at the table of the Challoners he was subdued 
and silent, or at other moments over-assiduous to please. Etoile 
noticed this, and wondered what relation he bore to them. 
She gathered from what was said by him and to him that he 
was a noble of Rome, a courtier, and the owner of an estate 
to which they constantly referred as Fiordelisa, but which 
seemed by some inexplicable arrangement to be the Lady 
Joan’s property also. 

“ What beautiful grapes !” the chief justice chanced to say; 
“ finest where all are fine. They are your own growth ?” 

The Lady Joan nodded assent. 

“ Yes ; they’re all off my vines, — down at Fiordelisa.” 

“ You like grapes, madame?” said loris to Etoile, who was 
opposite to him. “ Oh, you must allow me to send you some, 
— from Fiordelisa.” 

“ What is Fiordelisa ?” thought Etoile. She did not know 
that, although Fiordelisa was the property of loris, loris was 
still more absolutely the property of the Lady Joan. 

“ What a pretty name, Fiordelisa !” she hazarded, as she 
thanked him. 

Lady Joan interrupted his reply. 

“ Yes. It was a beastly old barrack when we went in it : 
but we have done no end to improve it, inside and out,” said 
the hostess, cracking a walnut. 

Etoile fancied that the face of the Roman prince grew a 
shade paler still, as with anger, but she thought it might be 
only her fancy ; all artists are fanciful. He drew a flower out 
of one of the bowls near him, and busied himself fastening it 
into his button-hole. 

Dinner over, they sauntered into one of the three or four little 
salons of the house, — a little room, with Smyrna carpets, and 
comfortable couches, and a great many pictures, and a great 
deal of china. Here the Lady Joan opened her cigar-case, 
threw herself back at ease, and expressed her hope that every- 
body smoked. Everybody did, except Etoile. 

“ Ah, comtesse, you are right and wise not to do so,” said 
the Prince loris, as he crossed over to her. “ Smoking has 
no grace upon a woman’s lips, and little sense on ours.” 

The Lady Joan hastily crossed over also, her cigar in her 
hand. 


6 * 


54 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“What things you do say, lo !” she muttered, crossly. 
“ You know Lady Cardiff smokes like a steam-engine. How 
stupid you were at dinner, too ! Go and amuse the chief 
justice: you see Mr. Challoner’s boring him to death.” 

He went obedient, but not resigned, to address the chief 
justice with all the warm and charming courtesy of his 
habitual manner, which, en mai Italien, was never warmer or 
more charming than when he was somewhat annoyed and very 
much wearied. The Lady Joan presented Lady Cardiff to the 
Countess d’Avesnes, and, content with the diversion she had 
effected, repaid herself with joining her male guests, and re- 
ceiving a person who just then entered, and whom she saluted 
delightedly as her “ very dear old Mimo !” 

The very dear old Mimo — otherwise Count Burletta — was 
a very shrewd person, of some fifty years, fat and fair, smiling 
and serene. Fate had given him a meagre purse and a keen 
eye; he rambled about Rome, in and out all sorts of odd 
places, and about three o’clock might be found at home any 
day, surrounded with the fruits of his rambles, ivories, 
enamels, tarsia work, china, cloisonne, lac, anything and every- 
thing that garrets and palaces, cellars and convents, could be 
persuaded to render ; in society he was a gentleman, and could 
lie like one ; in his shop he was honest, — unless he met with 
a fool ; fools, he thought, were sent by the saints as food was 
sent by Elijah’s ravens; he was a very good Catholic. 

The very dear old Mimo, dropping now down on the divan 
beside her, murmured to her many things in a low tone, un- 
heard by ears profane, and then drew out her guitar from 
under a pile of music. 

“ lo,” called the Lady Joan, “where’s that last song of 
the Trastevere you wrote down for me ? — the one we heard 
the girl sing as we came home from the Valle the other 
night?” 

loris left the chief justice and searched for the song. 

Being found, the Lady Joan would not sing it; she sang 
something else, the riband of her old Spanish guitar hanging 
over her shoulder, her sweeping velvet and her shining stars 
making a fine study for a painter, her handsome teeth gleaming 
and her eyes flashing up to her listeners with an amorous glitter- 
ing gaze that burned its way straight up to the face of loris, who 
leaned towards her and beat the time softly with his hand and 


FRIENDSHIP. 55 

gave back the answering glance that it was his due and duty 
to give. But 

“ That man is only feigning. Why does he have to feign ?” 
thought the Countess d’Avesnes, and looked to see if Mr. 
Challoner observed what she did. 

Mr. Challoner was too well drilled by thirteen years of 
wedded life ever to observe anything : Mr. Challoner at the 
other end of the room discussed political news with the chief 
justice in an undertone, so as not to disturb his wife’s singing. 
He never disturbed his wife : he was the marital model of the 
nineteenth century. There are many like him, but not perhaps 
many quite so perfect. 

His wife’s singing was agreeable, though she sang out of 
time and her accent was hai’sh : still, she had a rich voice 
naturally, and could give the songs of the populace, and the 
erotic lays of the streets and fields, with a force and a hrio 
hardly to be surpassed by the Homans themselves. 

It was not pure execution nor perfect phrasing, and it used 
to set the teeth of real musicians on edge, but there was some- 
thing contagious and intoxicating in it as she struck deep 
vibrations from the chords and poured from her glances a 
passionate light. She never looked so well as when she sang ; 
it sent warmth into her lips and took the hardness from her 
face ; singing, the passion that was in the woman broke up 
from the shrewd worldly sense and the prosaic temper that 
covered and hid it ; singing, she looked like the swart sovereign 
of Musset’s poem, who laughed to see the bold bull die and 
flung her broidered garter to her lover the matador. 

“ Allow me to compliment you on your gown, my dear 
comtesse,” said Lady Cardiff, meanwhile seated beside Etoile. 
“ You must be tired of compliments on your talents. What 
charming things Worth does for people of taste ! He clothes 
Mrs. Henry V. Clams over yonder, you know : what a differ- 
ence ! I am so glad you condescend to think about dress. It 
brings you nearer our poor humanity : genius so often, you 
know ” 

“ Is too much like St. Simeon Stylites. I quite agree with 
you. There is more affectation in sackcloth than in silk. Be- 
sides, to be clothed with taste is a pleasure to oneself. What 
do you call that remarkable person who thinks it necessary to 
load herself with rubies for a little dinner-party ?” 


56 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Mrs. Henry V. Clams. Fontebranda has made her, forced 
her down all our throats ; very cleverly he has done it. He’s 
no money, you know, and they’ve heaps. As somebody said 
of somebody in the last century (Due d’Orl^ans, wasn’t it?), 
not being able to make her Marquise Fontebranda, which 
I am sure he’d be very sorry to do, he has made himself 
Mr. Henry V. Clams, and I ’think it pays him very much 
better.” 

“ I see. Do you visit them ?” 

“ Oh, of course. Everybody visits them. They entertain 
very well : it’s all Fontebranda. Are you staying long in 
Rome ?” 

“ All the winter, I think.” 

“ Delighted 1 I hope it’s not true what they say, — that 
your lungs are affected ?” 

“ A little, I fear ; nothing serious.” 

“ Ah, dear me ! Aldebaran, — you should inhale Aldebaran. 
Do get a bottle. Consumption cured for half a crown ; you 
know the thing I mean.” 

“ I have more faith in the Roman air. Who is that person 
tuning Lady Joan’s guitar ?” 

“ Her very dear old Mimo ? Well, that is — Mimo, — Count 
Burletta, you know. A good creature. Tradesman from 
twelve to four ; Count all the rest of the day and night. If 
you want to buy teacups and triptychs, ask Lady Joan to take 
you there ; and, if you want to please, pay, and don’t ask the 
age of the object. Mean ? Oh, I mean nothing. Mimo is a 
connoisseur, — everybody is a connoisseur here, — and gives 
ignorant people the benefit of his knowledge. That is all. 
How do you like her singing?” 

“Well, you see, I am too used to great music to be very 
easily pleased. The first musicians of Paris gather at my 
house, and then my friend Dorotea sings to me alone so 
constantly.” 

“ Ah, the Duchesse Santorin. She is here, isn’t she?” 

“ She is gone. She only came to see me one day. She was 
engaged at Petersburg. She has promised me to return in 
two months.” 

“ Tell me, do tell me, — you must know, — is it true that 
Santorin has sent her a citation to appear ? that he is about 
to sue for a separation ?” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


57 


“ He has sent her a schedule of his latest debts. That is 
all that I know of ” 

“ But there is some scandal about that handsome Kussian, 
Souroff, that imperial aid-de-camp, — ^you know whom I mean. 
What is his name ? Fedor ?” 

“ There is no cause for any ; that I can assure you. Count 
Souroff is in the Caucasus.” 

“ Dear me !” said Lady Cardiff vaguely, disappointed, hut 
reflecting that of course the friend of the Duchesse Santorin 
must say that sort of thing. 

“ Lady Joan looks very handsome as she sings,” said Etoile, 
to change the theme. 

The English peeress put her glass up to her eye, and looked 
at the singer. 

“ A good-looking woman, yes, and highly born, and young 
still, and no fool, and yet married to a Mr. Challoner !” 

“ There are very odd things in life, are there not ?” con- 
tinued the marchioness, musingly. “ Nothing odder than its 
Mr. Challoners. You know her father? Indeed ! A charm- 
ing person : very unlike her^ don’t you think ? Yes, I am 
going ; sorry to leave you, but I must look in at the Ruspoli’s. 
I shall slip out quietly while she is making that noise. So 
charmed you have come to Home, my dear comtesse. Pray 
don’t forget my Mondays.” 

“ I suppose people do receive her ?” said Lady Cardiff to 
her host, who rushed to intercept her passage and to escort 
her down the stairs. 

“ Whom ? Etoile ? Oh, certainly : there never was a 
breath against her.” 

“ Oh, my dear Mr. Challoner, I don’t mean that. What 
does that matter? We receive tens of thousands of people 
with nor’ -westers blowing them black and blue” (Mr. Challo- 
ner winced) “ every day of their lives. Heaps of good people 
are out of society, and heaps of bad people in ; only we can’t 
receive anybody unless other folks receive her too. Nobody 
can hegin^ you know. It gets thrown against you afterwards : 
if a woman is really received, it don’t in the least matter what 
she’s done or what she does do. Nobody's any business with 
the rest of her life. Is she received ? That is all. As for 
this particular woman, she is charming. And, of course, 
everybody you know has the passport to my house, and every 
c* 


58 


FRIENDSHIP. 


other house. Coining to the Kuspoli’s ? No ? Ah, true ! 
You don’t know them. Pity. Many thanks. Very cold. 
Thanks. Good-evening.” 

And, having wrapped up many thorns in velvet in her 
parting speech, the Marchioness of Cardilf rolled away in her 
carriage to the Palazzo Ruspoli, leaving Mr. Challoner bowing 
on the step in the teeth of the sharp easterly wind, with all 
the thorns pricking in him as he turned and went up-stairs. 
Happily for himself, he had a tough epidermis, and could re- 
main impenetrable to thorns and even harpoons. Mr. Chal- 
loner knew that nothing answers in the long run like invul- 
nerability. 

His wife was still singing when he entered, and her very 
dear old Mimo was praising a little Masolino panel to the 
chief justice, who did not know much about art, but was very 
open-handed with his money, all the world knew. 

The Prince loris, having gazed his heart out through three 
songs, and made his eyes utter more amorous lyrics than any 
she sang, thought he had done what duty required of him, 
and sank away quietly into a corner of the sofa by Etoile, and 
picked up some fallen leaves of the tea-roses, and talked with 
serious feeling and graceful taste of various themes of art, and 
gazed at her as he did so with that musing studious regard 
which is the subtlest form of early homage. 

The Lady Joan saw, and sang out of time for two seconds. 
The Lady Joan threw her guitar aside with a haste and force 
that imperilled its safety, and came out of her little circle of 
admiring listeners, and bore down on the sofa where loris was 
still tossing a few fragrant tea-rose leaves in his hand and 
talking of art. 

“ Go with her to-morrow to the Logg^ ?” she called out, 
sharply. “ What are you thinking of, lo ? You’ve got to 
take me to the studios ; and then there is that bust to see to 
at Fricco’s, and the Bishop of Melita coming to luncheon, and 
there are heaps of things in the afternoon. You can’t go 
anywhere to-morrow. Besides, she’s got old Padre Mai-cello, 
— a man who carries more art-knowledge about Borne in his 
little finger than you do in all your brain, which is not the 
very biggest to hold anything.” 

She laughed as she spoke, and blew some smoke round her 
classic hand. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


59 


loris bowed resignedly. 

“ I am at your commands, madame, of course, as always.” 

“ Oh, are you !” said his hostess, roughly, too out of temper 
to be able to control the irritability she felt. “ Then another 
time don’t keep me twenty minutes waiting, as you did this 
morning at Fricco’s. What were you after?” 

“ I was at the Vatican.” 

“Well, you must be here to-morrow at ten. Mind that; 
and see Pippo has the new curb on : he jibbed dreadfully 
yesterday. Are you going ? So early ? I am so sorry ! it 
is only eleven o’clock,” she continued, with her frankest pleas- 
antest smile, as Etoile rose from the sofa, unconscious that 
her rose-leaves had been falling on a volcano’s brink. 

“We must be friends for my father’s sake,” said Lady 
Joan. “How glad I am you came to Rome !” And she fol- 
lowed her through the rooms and the anteroom, with cordial 
phrases and a dozen pleasant kindly plans for future intimacy 
and mutual amusement. 

loris, evading direction, reached down the furs, and envel- 
oped with them the maize and black bows of Worth, and gave 
Etoile his arm. 

“ How handsome she is, and very agreeable,” said Etoile, 
as they went down-stairs. 

loris was silent. 

“You are a friend of Lord Archie’s?” he said, after a 
moment’s pause, — a pause, it seemed to her, of some slight 
embarrassment. 

“ Yes ; I know him well, — dear gentle Lord Archie.” 

“ I also am fond of Lord Archie.” 

“ Are you any relation to them ?” 

“ None at all,” replied loris, with a certain impatience. “ I 
may have the honor to call on you, madame. Perhaps I may 
be of some little use. No doubt you will know every one in 
Rome, but anything that I could do ” 

Mr. Challoner overtook them on the staircase, with Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams and Fontebranda, who were leaving also. 

“ My wife wants you, loris,” said the gentleman : “ there is 
some other song that can’t be found.” 

“ You have forgotten this, madame,” said loris, in the street, 
as he escaped from Mr. Challoner, putting the big black 
Spanish fan through the window of the carriage. “ And do 


60 


FRIENDSHIP. 


not heed what the Lady Joan said. I will have the honor of 
waiting on you to-morrow at noon for the Logge, and although 
certainly I cannot compete in knowledge with the Padre Mar- 
cello, still, if zeal and devotion can serve you at all in this my 
native city ” 

The horses, impatient, reared and plunged forward on the 
uneven pavement of the street, and left his phrase unfinished 
upon Etoile’s ear. 

He looked a moment into the moonlight, then reascended 
the stairs. 

“ lo,” cried the Lady Joan, “ come and make me some 
fresh cigarettes. No'W we can enjoy ourselves. Mimo’s got 
such a capital story, — awfully salato, but so good.” 


CHAPTER VII. 

The Lady Joan Challoner came of a very good old stock. 

The Perth-Douglas family was one about whose ancient- 
ness and admirableness there could never be any dispute. 
The Perth-Douglases had always been gentlefolks, and their 
names could be read backwards by the light of history as far 
as the days of Flodden and of Bannockburn. Though of 
such knightly descent, they were very poor, and of no great 
estate ; but they were own cousins to the mighty Earl of 
Hebrides, had intermarried with the no less mighty Marquises 
of Lothian, were cousins-german to the Dukes of Lochwithian 
and the Lords of Fingal, and owned Scotch cousinships to 
more peers than the Order of the Thistle embraces, and as 
many baronets as the Nova Scotia riband adorns. 

Her father, Archibald Angus Perth-Douglas, fifth Earl of 
Arhiestoune, — always called by his friends Archie, — had no 
seat in the Lords, and was glad of a Government place and a 
small ofiSce at court. He was an infinitely charming person, 
whom everybody loved and caressed. Her mother had been 
a beauty and a wit ; her grandmother the same. The Lady 
Joan, at nineteen, had been married to Mr. Robert Challoner, 
an obscure gentleman, whose parentage was doubtful and whose 


FRIENDSHIP. 


61 


prosperity was dubious. People had wondered very much why 
such a handsome well-born girl as Joan Perth-Douglas should 
be married to a Mr. Challoner. 

If she had been a trifle cleverer than the clever woman she 
was, of course she would have told people she had adored him, 
and had insisted on having him and none other. But, as she 
always told everybody roundly that she had always hated him, 
this explanation could not be put forward by even her blindest 
admirers. 

There were one or two people who did know why, — really 
why, — but a popular and eminent politician had been trustee 
to the marriage-settlements, and no one could be indiscreet 
enough to persist in inquiring why the settlements ever had 
been drawn up at all. 

The Lady Joan all her life long was rich in discreet friends. 

Still, even the discreetest friends will, like the closest-packed 
hold of a ship, leak occasionally. Salt water and secrets are 
alike apt to ooze. So, whatever the reason might be, the 
Challoners lived out of England. 

The Perth-Douglases were clever people, and had had the 
knack of always frequenting the society of cleverer people 
than themselves. Without ever having distinguished them- 
selves intellectually, they yet had thus gained an intellectual 
reputation ; and on the feet of their ladies there had been often 
stockings of blue. 

For gentle, gracious, handsome Earl Archie, his women 
were too many and too strong, and they worried him sorely : 
he consoled himself with society, which was always delighted 
to console him. His wife — beautiful and masterful — and his 
mother and sisters, not so beautiful, but masterful too, dis- 
puted and quarrelled and vexed him. He was a man who 
thought peace the one supreme good of life, but he was seldom 
destined to enjoy it. His lot was cast throughout existence 
amidst Tnaitresses-feinmes : they are admirable and wonderful 
beings, no doubt, but no man ever found them conducive to 
his comfort as companions. 

Of his daughter Lord Archie had never felt that he knew 
very much. He had thought the marriage a very odd one 
and a very disadvantageous one, and had done his best in his 
gentle, sweet-tempered, tranquil fashion to oppose it. But 
when he was told by his wife and his old friend the eminent 


62 


FRIENDSHIP. 


politician that it had to be, and was the best thing that could 
be, he acquiesced, because acquiescence had become his habit 
with his numerous feminine rulers. 

He was not behind the scenes ; and they told him a great 
many fictions of the Challoner fortune and the Challoner de- 
votion : after all it was as the girl liked, it was her affair more 
than any one’s. 

Gentle Lord Archie thought everything was for the best in 
this best of all possible worlds. He never worried himself or 
anybody else. He gave away his daughter at the altar, to 
what he stigmatized in his own soul as a cad, with the same 
benign placidity with which, a dozen years afterwards, he lay 
in the sunshine and smoked his cigars under the walnut-trees 
at Fiordelisa: everything was all right, — that was Lord 
Archie’s formula. It is the only one possible for a man 
governed by three generations of women with wills of their 
own. 

Thirteen years had gone by since Lord Archie had led his 
daughter up to the marriage-altar, wondering why Joan, who 
had been a good deal admired at her first drawing-room, and 
had spirit enough for fifty cavalry soldiers, had not waited a 
little while and done better for herself. 

Thirteen years found the Lady Joan still a young woman. 

She had swept a good deal of adventure into the dozen and 
one seasons that Mr. Challoner’s name had been her sunshade 
in the heats of slander, and her waterproof in the storms of 
censure. 

Mr. Challoner’s business, in which he had risen from a clerk 
to a managing partner, lying in Damascus and Aleppo, she 
had had the far East and the vague sand-plains of distant 
countries for her theatre ; and, in spite of steam and of elec- 
tricity, — those fatal levellers of illusion, — the “ far Orient” 
still remains to the European mind a shadowy and gorgeous 
panorama of mystery. 

Perhaps through that golden haze of distance the Euro- 
pean mind saw the adventures of the Lady Joan, as in a 
mirage, multiplied : at any rate, home-coming travellers told 
many tales, and averred that “ Archie’s daughter” was “ going 
it over there.” She had Asiatic ministers for her henchmen, 
and Turkish pashas for her obedient slaves ; big bankers were 
as babies in her hands, and imperial steamers were at her beck 


FRIENDSHIP. 


63 


and call ; when a good-looking wayfarer chanced to have time 
for such pastimes, she would have her Arab steeds saddled 
and scamper away with him over ‘the Syrian Desert ; and a 
young titled Giaour on his pilgrimage found no resting-place 
more agreeable than her flat house-top in Damascus, with 
champagne in the ice-pails, and Mr. Challoner in his counting- 
house. 

If anybody thought it odd that she should camp out on the 
sand-plains with strangers, such people were old fogies in the 
Lady Joan’s eyes; these men were all her brothers, — a kind 
Providence sent them to prevent her yawning her head off 
with the intolerable boredom of Mr. Challoner ’s company, — 
and she would jump on her mare, and cut her across the ears, 
and scamper off with silver-mounted pistols in her sash, and a 
cigar in her mouth, knowing very well that Mrs. Grundy 
cannot do you much harm when you ride under the shadow 
of Mount Lebanon. And even had Mrs. Grundy loomed 
there in the stead of Mount Lebanon, she could have said 
nothing, because Mr. Challoner himself never said anything. 

He busied himself with his exports of jewelry and prayer- 
carpets, of spice and specie, of rubies and rice, and his busi- 
ness generally, and his fellow-merchants, and his own reflec- 
tions, and moved about Damascus, and other cities of the East, 
a very big man among the Jews and Gentiles, the Turks and 
the Persians, because of the Perth-Douglas connection away 
in the North, and the privilege it bestowed on him to ask any 
travelling Englishman of rank to dinner and speak of “ my 
wife’s cousins” the Countess of Hebrides or the Duchess of 
Lochwithian. 

When, some six years later, having ruined a very fine busi- 
nesS'by too fine speculations, he found it expedient to leave 
the bazaars and retreat on his wife’s settlements, she brought 
with her from the red Eastern skies a duskier hue on her 
handsome face, a great skill at rolling cigarettes, much good 
Turkish tobacco, and some good Oriental jewelry, some trash 
and some treasure out of the bazaars, a great many souvenirs, 
— some tender, some fierce, — and a decided experience that 
she might play “ poker” with all the Ten Commandments, so 
long as she wrapped herself in the proof armor of Mr. Chal- 
loner’s approval and acquiescence. 

She had learned by heart the Arab proverb that “ she who 


64 


FRIENDSHIP. 


has her husband with her may turn the moon around her 
finger.” 

So useful was her husband, indeed, that at weak moments 
she was almost grateful to him, and absolutely called him 
Kobert, a condescension very rare with her, as she never let 
him or anybody forget that she had a right to write herself 
“ born Perth- Douglas.” 

But, the Black Sea once crossed again, the Lady Joan saw 
Mrs. Grundy, the British Bona Dea, looming large on her 
horizon, as the Colossus once did upon the sea from Rhodes. 

The Lady Joan was shrewd enough to know that the British 
Bona Dea will not believe that all men are your brothers. 
The Lady Joan pulled her mainsail in, and tacked her course 
so as to pass safely under the Colossus. 

It had not been worth while out there, but here it was so. 
And, after all, it was better to keep decently well with that 
little house in Mayfair, and all the family ties and honors. 
The little house had borne a great deal indeed, as little houses 
when they are the abode of a Great House often do ; great 
houses never washing their dirty linen in the street. But 
Lady Joan knew that there were some things that would be 
too strong even for the little house in Mayfair, and that it 
would never do not to dine there when she went over “ on 
business” to London, though she had to scream till she was 
hoarse into her grandmother’s ear- trumpet, and derived no 
pleasure from hearing the Head of the Opposition read his 
“ Notes on the (Ecumenical Council” or his conception of an 
obscure passage of Tertullian. 

So, for sake of the little house in Mayfair, and of a 
great many big houses all over Europe that she desired to 
enter, the Lady Joan, leaving the Bagdad bazaars and the 
Great Desert, left her imprudence behind her, and consigned 
everything of a dangerous sort to oblivion, except the Khe- 
dive’s inspiration of her letters to the “ Planet” newspaper, 
and the pearls with which the Emir of Yarkund had pre- 
sented her for saving his life from poison. 

For, touching a European strand, the hand of Mrs. Grundy 
clasped her, and the shadow of Mrs. Grundy fell on her as 
in eclipse falls the shade of the “ stolid earth upon the giddy 
moon.” 

In the East, Lady Joan had been very young, very reck- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


65 


less, with her spirits far outbalancing her prudence, and her 
savageness at her exile and social extinction avenging itself by 
all those wild night-rides with the good-looking travellers, 
and all those campings out under the desert stars, with no- 
body to play propriety except the Arab boys and the tethered 
ponies. 

The Lady Joan in her childhood, even in the year or two 
between her presentation at court and her social extinction 
under the Challoner settlements, had seen the really great 
world. All that was best in society had habitually gathered 
round her beautiful mother. She knew what mighty people, 
and witty people, and people of fashion, and people of genius, 
were. For the Anglo-Persian world of shabby adventurers, 
of hungry commercial folks, of intriguing speculators, of oily 
Jews, of lean Gentiles, and of trade-fattened nobodies, her 
contempt had been naturally boundless. She had done as she 
liked, and scolfed at the whole lot, and only smiled on them 
when she wanted a steamer or any such little trifle of them. 
She was a Perth-Douglas ; and if she chose to dance the 
Carmagnole in all their counting-houses the mercantile mud 
of Asia Minor could only be honored : so she danced it. 

But when the chill colossal shadow of Mrs. Grundy fell 
across her path. Lady Joan saw that she must mend her 
ways. It was not steamers that she would want now, but suf- 
frages. 

Of course she despised Mrs. Grundy as much as she had 
despised the mercantile mud : Mrs. Grundy was an old cat, 
and represented old cats collectively. Still, it was necessary 
to conciliate her, and even in the country of the cicishei it 
would be best to be on good terms with Society. 

Of course Society should never really interfere with her 
liberty ; of course Society should never prevent her regarding 
all men as her brothers ; of course Society should never alter 
her dancing the Carmagnole over the convenances^ as she had 
done over the counting-houses whenever she liked : neverthe- 
less, she said to herself she would reconcile herself with So- 
ciety. 

There were many things to be got by it, and Society after 
all asks yery little. Society only asks you to wash the outside 
of your cup and platter : inside you may keep any kind of 
nastiness that you like : only wash the outside ; do wash the 

6 * 


66 


FRIENDSHIP. 


outside, says Society; and it would be a churl or an ass 
indeed who would refuse so small a request. 

Lady Joan set to work and washed her cup and platter with 
such a clatter and so many soap-suds, and summoned so many 
good people to look on at her doing it, that no one could pos- 
sibly ask her what she drank and ate out of it, nor who sipped 
from it with her. 

Mr. Challoner himself set both cup and platter upon a 
shelf in the sight of Society. Society could want no more. 

As lawless free-lances in days of old entered monkish cells 
and buried Dick the Devil or Dent du Sanglier forever under 
Brother Philarete or Father Joseph, so the Lady Joan, enter- 
ing society, immured her Eastern escapades under the seal of 
an entire self-oblivion. Nothing was ever to be remembered 
by anybody that she wished to be forgotten. This was settled. 
It is a demand that women are very fond of making on the 
good nature or the good taste of mankind. And if occasion- 
ally she met an old friend uncivil enough or unkind enough, 
without knowing that he did wrong, to “ hint past history” 
and disturb the present, she would, with all the heartiest air 
of candor and of wonder in the world, — 

“ Stare upon the strange man’s face 
As one she ne’er had known,” 

and continue so to stare in despite of all recollections that he 
might invoke. 

It was still a marriage for which none could see any raison 
d'etre. But when you go to the East and stay there in a 
kind of golden mist it is easy to leave explanations behind you 
when you return. All that trading of the Levant in various 
goods, from bales of hay to squares of prayer-carpet, to which 
Mr. Challoner owed his being, had come to an untimely end- 
ing, as was well enough known, from Bagdad to Brindisi, to 
all merchants and bankers. And Mr. Challoner had only 
saved a few thousands out of the crash, and was, in real truth, 
an unfortunate gentleman with a hankering turn for specu- 
lation. 

But the Lady Joan was not troubled by such little facts as 
these: the magnificence of her imagination raised her far 
above all prosaic realities : what a few old fogies in bank-par- 
lors or on public exchanges might say or know was nothing to 


FRIENDSHIP. 


67 


her ; according to her Mr. Challoner had been Croesus ; the 
rice and the carpets were merged vaguely into what she called 
“ our bank Solomon’s Temple had not been more gorgeous 
than the fortunes to which her family had sacrificed her. 

There had been failures ; yes, certainly there had been 
failures ; but then even Croesus could not escape Cyrus. 

As for what those old fools of consuls and merchants said, 
that was all rubbish ; and she would close with an apotheosis 
of herself as a sort of Scmiramis of Finance, in which the 
angels who upheld her in the empyrean were “ dear old Pam,” 
and “ dear old Thiers,” and “ dear old Elgin,” and anybody 
else of magnitude appropriate whom she had ever had a nod 
from in her babyhood in her grandmother’s little house in 
Mayfair. 

There was, indeed, scarce a great man in France, England, 
or Germany whom she did not claim as her “ dearest old” A, 
B, or C ; if a critic or a chancellor, a savant or a general, a 
geologist or a Prime Minister, had ever walked thirty years 
before into her mother’s drawing-room when she was playing 
on the hearth-rug with her alphabet, the critic or chancellor, 
the savant or general, the geographer or Prime Minister, was 
now forever in the mouth of the Lady Joan as her one dearest 
old friend, that was more devoted to her than any other living 
creature on the face of the earth. 

Perhaps she had recalled herself once to their bewildered 
memories in some crowded reception ; perhaps she had 
bowed to them twice in the Pi'ater, the Bois, or the Mall ; 
perhaps she never had seen them at all since the days of her 
alphabet : all this mattered nothing ; the critic or chancellor, 
savant, general, geographer, or Prime Minister, never were by 
when she dilated upon them with such glowing affection, and, 
even if they had been, would have been too polite to contradict 
her. Gentlemen do not contradict women, nor yet show them 
up, — a chivalrous weakness of mankind, of which the weaker 
sex always takes the very sternest advantage. 

Occasionally those disagreeable and sceptical people who are 
to be found spoiling all society would hint that, with such dis- 
tinguished friendships and such illimitable political and liter- 
ary connections, it was a little wonderful that the Lady Joan 
should have married a Mr. Challoner and take an interest in 
teacups and triptychs. But such people were in the minority. 


68 


FRIENDSHIP. 


For the most part, her use of her dearest old A, B, and C, at 
moments when A was organizing a great war, or B busied in 
discrowning kings, or C sending forth on the world a great 
book mighty as Thor’s hammer, was of infinite gain to her; 
and her allies would go hither and thither, important and con- 
fidential, and whisper, “ She knew the declaration of war five 
days before anybody or, “ He wrote to her the very night 
he dictated his abdication or, “ She had an early copy even 
before it went to the ‘ Revue des Deux Mondes and these 
fictions flew about lively as gnats and productive as bees, and 
secured many cards to her big Delft card-plate, because, 
though nobody believed all of it, everybody said some of it 
must be true, — yes, a great deal of it must be true, — because 
people never will admit or even think that they are the mere 
dupes of a brilliant audacity. 

To the world in general. A, B, and C were names of mag- 
nitude and weight, of awe or of adoration, as the case might 
be ; but to her they were only “ dear old creatures.” Had 
they not stumbled over her alphabet thirty years before upon 
her mother’s hearth-rug? 

It was an alliance for a lifetime. 

According to the Lady Joan, she was a Nausicaa, airily 
frolicking on the edge of the vast ocean of European compli- 
cations ; and Odysseus had gone through all his woes and war- 
fare, and only lay in wait under the waves, just to be ready to 
catch her ball for her, — only just for that. 

Odysseus never even saw her, never even thought of her, 
as he waded in his deep dark seas ; but all that did not matter 
to her. 

Nor to her associates. 

“ Such a woman ! ah, such a woman I” would murmur 
plump Mimo Burletta. “ Palmerston^ relied on her for all 
his secret information of Oriental things; Palmerston^ told 
her when she was eighteen that if she were but a man she 
would die Prime Minister of the Crown ; Palmerston^ was 
not one to call a lemon-pip a lemon, — ah, no, no, no ! — Palmer- 
ston^ knew !” And Burletta would walk about and spread 
out his fat hands in honest adoration of her mighty powers 
and of himself for being the confidant of so great a creature, 
and in his mind’s eye, when it was not concentrated on tea- 
cups and triptychs, always beheld the Lady Joan seated as on 


FRIENDSHIP. 


69 


a throne within the sacred recesses of the Privy Council 
chamber of the Universe, for he knew as much about such 
things as a French grocer in the provinces knows of the “ Lord 
Maire de Londres,” and the Lady Joan’s magnificent confi- 
dences had dazzled him too much to much enlighten him. 

Exaggeration aside, she had very great connections and re- 
lationships, and never forgot or let anybody else forget that 
she had them. When a cousin of high degree came near she 
proclaimed the fact as loudly and loyally as heralds in days of 
old shouted the titles and tidings of a new king ; and these 
mighty personages did her unwittingly yeoman’s service. 

They were her cork buoys on the yeasty seas of European 
society. Big people liked her because she took such infinite 
trouble to please them, and little people liked her because she 
could bring them in contact with the big people. 

Both big and little people always apologized to one another 
for knowing her ; every one excused their own special counte- 
nances on some especial plea in their own especial society. 
But, as she never knew this, it did not affect her comfort : 
indeed. Lady Joan was of that happy disposition which could 
ignore all enmity and accept all slights unmoved, and if she 
knew some one had been abusing her would meet the offender 
with such a smile, and such an emphatic cordiality, that she 
was the best Christian that ever, being buffeted on one cheek, 
turned graciously the other. 

It was thoroughly sound policy. 

Proud women, and sensitive women, take hints and resent 
rebuffs, and so exile themselves from the world prematurely 
and haughtily. They abdicate, the moment they see that any 
desire their discrowning. But Lady Joan was not troubled 
with this kind of delicacy. Abdication is grand, no doubt. 
But possession is more profitable. “ A well-bred dog does 
not wait to be kicked out,” says the old see-saw. But the 
well-bred dog thereby turns himself into the cold and leaves 
the crumbs from under the table to some other dog with less 
good-breeding and more worldly wisdom. The sensible thing 
to do is to stay wherever you like best to be, — stay there with 
tooth and claw ready and a stout hide on which cudgels break. 
People, after all, soon get tired of kicking a dog that never 
will go. 

High breeding was admirable in days when the world itself 


70 


FRIENDSHIP. 


was high-bred. But those days are over. The world takes 
high breeding now as only a form of insolence. 

Lady Joan saw this, and never troubled the world with it. 

“ The old cat slangs me like a pickpocket,” she would say 
of some dowager-countess who did not return her card. But 
when she met the dowager-countess she would say, “ Ah, 
dearest Lady Blank ! Where are you staying ? I am so 
sorry I have seen so little of you. You’ll come and dine 
with us ? What night, now ? Do fix a night ; pray do.” 

And nine times out of ten the Lady Blanks would relent 
and leave a card, and even go and eat a dinner at the Casa 
Challoner. For the Casa Challoner dinners were good, and 
the Casa Challoner understood the axiom that it is not what 
comes out of your own mouth but what you put into other 
people’s that makes your friends or enemies. Besides, “ you 
can’t cut a woman who won’t know when she’s cut,” said a 
Lady Blank once : — Lady Joan had this most useful ignorance. 

So on the whole she managed to enjoy life in Europe as in 
the East. There were always times when she could “ throw 
her cap over the mill” and dance the Carmagnole, if there 
were also many seasons that she had to put on her meeting- 
house clothes and curtsy to Mrs. Grundy. 

And besides, be the season what it would, there was always 
— Fiordelisa. 


CHAPTER VIII. 

On the morrow the Prince loris, faithful to his word, went 
as noon chimed from all the bells of Rome to the Hotel de 
Russie and inquired for the Countesse d’Avesnes. But he 
learned that she had already gone out, alone, — had been out 
since sunrise. He left his card and turned his steps along the 
Corso to the Casa Challoner. He was a good deal disap- 
pointed and a little irritated, — more irritated than was reason- 
able. 

“ How late you are, lo ! I told you ten o’clock,” said the 
Lady Joan, in high wrath. 

She was ready-dressed for the streets, with her hat set well 


FRIENDSHIP. 


71 


over her black brows, and her person muffled in sealskin. 
Her friend noticed for the first time that her skirts were too 
short, and her boots were ill made, and her eyes were green in 
the sunlight. 

He pressed both her hands in his own and dropped on one 
knee before her sofa. 

“ You must forgive me. My head ached, and I had many 
letters to see to and answer.” 

“ I thought you were gone to Etoile. You talked of it,” 
said the Lady Joan, with an angry suspicion flashing in her 
eyes. 

“ Etoile ! Cara mia, what living woman could keep me 
away one second from here?” 

Kneeling still on the tiger-skin before her, his lips caressed 
her with more softness than the words. 

“ Don’t be a goose, lo ; we’re past all that, — at least so 
early in the morning,” said the Lady Joan. But she smiled 
as she pushed him away, and was well pleased that he should 
be what she called a goose. Had he not been thus a goose, 
darkest wrath would have gathered on her stormy brows. 

“ Let’s get off, though,” she said, disengaging herself, but 
sweeping his hair off his forehead with a rough caress as she 
rose. “ We’re so late as it is, and I'm awfully afraid that 
the dealer from Paris will have got those little pictures of 
Cecchino’s: the boy’s beginning to know his value and asl^ 
a price.” 

loris loaded himself with her wraps, her umbrella, and her 
little dog, and followed her down the stairs to the fiacre. 

When she did not take his ponies out she drove in a hack 
carriage. Not to keep a carriage was an economy on which 
she prided herself. 

“ A carriage is only ostentation : snobs want one : I don’t,” 
she would say, in her blunt, pleasant manner. “ I always tell 
Mr. Challoner I like my own legs; and when they’re tired 
there’s always a cab ; cabs are so cheap.” 

A'nd so, indeed, they were, since loris always paid for 
them. 

The hired carriage started off, Mr. Challoner reprding its 
departure placidly from a window, for his friendship and his 
faith were both strong, and the wheels rattled noisily up and 
down the hilly streets of Boine. 


72 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ What did you think of Etoile ?” she asked loris as they 
drove. Etoile was very much in her own thoughts. 

“ She does not please me particularly,” he answered, care- 
lessly, as he lighted a cigar. 

“ Do you think her attractive ?” 

“ No, not at all.” 

“We must see a good deal of her. Voightel recommends 
her to me so strongly.” 

Her friend shrugged his shoulders. 

“ Why do you do that ? Will she bore you ?” 

“ I think her manner insolent. She seems to see no one. 
She is nonchalante: she is indifferent. I should think her 
cold.” 

“ She must warm for you, lo !” said Lady Joan, with a 
gleam of anxiety and irony in her eyes. 

“ Oh ! Dieu m'en garde r 

It was said with so genuine an emphasis, and so careless 
and gay a laugh, that Lady Joan was quite satisfied as she as- 
cended and descended scores of dark, foul-smelling stairways, 
her friend behind her, into the garrets of the young painters. 
The Challoners were well-known patrons of young painters, 
and especially given to such patronage when those studious 
lads had a talent for making new canvases look like old. 

The Lady Joan adored art : she told everybody so. She 
j)assed half her present life striding in and out of ateliers, and 
petting painters, and buying canvases ; the cheaper she bought 
them the better was she pleased, for of course the Challoner 
purse could not afibrd a large purchase except now and then 
on speculation. 

The old masters, fortunately for the Challoner purse, were 
so bounteously thoughtful of those who would come after them 
(and sell them) that they all had their schools. Now, “ Scoula 
di Perugino,” “ Scoula di Tiziano,” sound almost as imposing 
as Perugino and Tiziano alone ; and, what is still more advan- 
tageous, these schools have been prolonged into the present 
day, and have many disciples hard at work still in the various 
styles, on impasto and chiaroscuro with varnish and smoke, in 
many attics and cellars of Florence, Naples, and Rome. To 
these young disciples the Lady Joan was a goddess ; and if 
they grumbled now and then at her prices, that was but youth’s 
idle ingratitude ; Minerva was not worse than a dealer ; whilst 


FRIENDSHIP. 


73 


away in Great Britain acres on acres of new plaster walls bloomed 
with fair Madonnas and glowed with fierce martyrdoms, and 
Shoddy, that had built the walls, was satisfied and triumphant. 
So much joy can one clever woman diffuse. 

The young painters did, indeed, say savage things of these 
kind patrons of theirs in moments of confidence, when together 
over macaroni and wines in an osferia outside the gates. But 
this was only the ingratitude of the artistic nature, which, it 
is well known, always does turn against its best benefactors. 
And when one was born a Perth-Douglas, and has been 
obliged to marry a Mr. Challoner, and has never had as much 
money as one wanted for anything, it would be hard indeed if 
one might not enjoy such innocent compensations as may lie 
for one in the Fine Arts. 

Most people (except artists) carried off the impression that 
Lady Joan knew a good deal about art. She had a bright, 
firm, imposing way of declaring her opinions infallible that 
went far towards making others believe them so. She knew 
that in this Age of Advertisement modesty is your ruin : what 
one has does not matter much ; it is by what one seems to 
have that one rises or falls nowadays. 

Connoisseurs and scholars found Lady Joan appallingly ig- 
norant, and looked at each other helplessly when she swore a 
Byzantine crucifix was a Cellini, or a bit of Berlin pate dure 
was Capo di Monte; when she assigned rococo jewelry to 
Agnes Sorel, and a panel of the Bologna Decadence to Andrea 
Mantegna. 

But then those connoisseurs and scholars are not all the world, 
and Lady Joan addressed herself to that much larger body, 
— the great majority of the uneducated. Indeed, perhaps 
nobody can comprehend how utterly uneducated it is possible 
to be who has not lived entirely with the educated classes. 

Before the mass of idle people, moneyed people, ladies of 
fashion, and princes of shoddy she found an audience credu- 
lous of her assertions and uncritical of her pretensions, and 
very easily dazzled and bewildered with a little talk about 
schools and tones ; about early painters whom they did not like 
to avow they had never heard of ; about Frankenthal, which 
they vaguely mixed up with Frankenstein ; about Marc An- 
tonios, which they confused with Marc Antony ; about Nan- 
kin, which they thought was a stuff, and found was a china; 

D 7 


74 


FRIENDSHIP. 


of Kose du Barry, which they fancied was a mistress of Louis 
XY., but could not understand as a cup ; of Certosina, which 
they had an idea must mean something monastic; and of 
Bramante, which rhymed with llozinante, and must be Span- 
ish, they felt sure. 

To rely on the general ignorance of mankind is usually safe, 
and Lady Joan did so rely not in vain. She was often found 
out in her blunders, indeed, and often laughed at ; but then, as 
she was a gentlewoman, and not a tradesman, nobody ever told 
her, and people only laughed behind her back. That she 
could by any possibility ever be laughed at, never entered her 
own imagination. 

This morning she raced up and down innumerable stairs, 
and in and out innumerable workshops of painters and sculp- 
tors and wood-carvers, her hat well pulled down over her 
broad black brows, and her friend laboring under her wraps 
behind her. She cheapened everything she saw; made a 
million mistakes, which her friend softly corrected sotto voce ; 
sat down astride before the easels, and smoked the artists’ 
cigars ; diffused generally a sense of her own enormous influ- 
ence with the English press and the English purchasers ; 
bought a good deal of canvas and terra-cotta at dealers’ prices ; 
wearied her companion and bullied him ; slapped students on 
the shoulders and rallied them with boisterous good fellowship ; 
enjoyed herself exceedingly, and then, as the clock struck one 
in a neighboring church-tower, “pulled herself together” and 
recollected her social duties. 

“ Come to luncheon, lo,” she said, after the last studio, 
flinging away her last cigar-end. “ Yes, you’d better come. 
It’s the bishop of Melita and roast mutton. Oh, yes, a horrid 
bore ; but you’d better come. If the bishop lunch with you 
it’ll shut ’em up for a twelvemonth.” 

Who were to be “ shut up” she did not explain, but her 
companion understood that the indefinite expression alluded to 
Mrs. Grundy and her myriad mouths. 

“ Qui est Madame Griindie^ ma cMre the Prince loris 
had asked in surprise on first hearing of this mighty dame ; 
but he never asked now ; he had learned that Madame Griindee 
was the Bona Dea of the Lady Joan. 

“ My dear lo ! you don’t know Mrs. Grundy !” Lady Joan 
would retort, when he wondered to see the cigars banished, 


FRIENDSHIP. 


75 


the laugh hushed, the propriety donned, the domestic scene 
set, and Mr. Challoner taken about in the stead of himself, 
when the mighty Northerners came down with all pomp into 
Rome. She herself did know Mrs. Grundy, — had felt that 
lady’s bujSets, and knew the power of that lady’s smile. She 
was aware that Mrs. Grundy represented money, dinners, court 
halls, embassy receptions, and all the rest of the advantages 
of society, and in her heart of hearts, though she would boast 
otherwise, was afraid of Mrs. Grundy, — sorely afraid some- 
times. 

There is no such coward as the woman who toadies society 
because she has outraged society. The bully is never brave. 

“Oignez vilain il vous poindra: poignez vilain il vous 
oindra,” is as true of the braggart’s soul still as it used to be 
in the old days of Froissart, when the proverb was coined. 

Lady Joan was a bully by nature, and gave way to her 
nature without scruple or pity ; but she knew that society was 
a bigger bully than herself, and did homage to it in the dust 
accordingly. 

On this occasion Prince loris shuddered at the idea of 
cooked sheep as even one of his own peasants would have 
done ; and an English bishop was to him a nondescript ani- 
mal of appalling and inexplicable anatomy ; but he was well 
used to surrendering his own will, and accompanied his hostess 
submissively to her house, where he brushed the dust off 
himself and washed his hands in Mr. Challoner’s own sanc- 
tum in that amicable community of goods which characterized 
his and that gentleman’s friendship. 

The Lady Joan carefully deodorized herself of all traces of 
cigar-smoke, brushed back her hair, and, sitting down for ten 
minutes by her dressing-room fire, glanced hurriedly through 
an article in the “ Contemporary Review” on the dispute be- 
tween Yalentinian and Damasus in the days of the Early 
Church ; then, telling loris to come in five minutes after her, 
as if he came through the hall-door, went herself ready primed 
in all the proprieties to receive the Anglican Bishop of Melita 
and his wife to the roast loin of thoroughly domestic mutton. 

The Anglican Bishop of Melita was a spare, solemn, schol- 
arly person, who had been head of a House in Cambridge in 
his time. His wife was a no less solemn but much stouter 
personage, who had been the daughter of a dean, and was the 


76 


FRIENDSHIP. 


niece, sister, and sistcr-in-law of quite countless canons, rectors, 
and pastors of all kinds. They had been presented to the 
Challoners two days before; and Mr. Challoner, who could 
bring up heavy artillery when required not unsuccessfully, 
had immediately engaged them for luncheon at once and a 
dinner at eight days’ notice. 

Mr. Challoner’s own recollections of the island of Melita 
were not agreeable ones ; but for that very reason he desired 
that all the world should behold how intimate he was with the 
bishop of that valuable English possession. It was, indeed, 
by attention to such trifles as these that Mr. Challoner had 
succeeded in burying from the eyes of his wife’s world all the 
uncomfortable little secrets that Melita had known of him and 
his. In this matter he and the Lady Joan were almost of 
accord. Whatever else they disagreed about (and they did 
disagree about nearly everything), they always agreed that 
it was absolutely necessary to muzzle Madame Griindee. 
Madame Griindee is the one deity that English Society recog- 
nizes, — indeed, the only one that makes it go to church at all. 

Lady Joan, a bold woman, grinned and grimaced at the 
goddess in the privacy of her life ; but, being a wise woman, 
she did decorous worship to the goddess in the sight of others. 
She snapped her fingers at her Bona Dea behind her back ; 
but she took care to bow with the rest in front of the altars. 

This is the true wisdom of a woman. A poet’s brain leaks 
through dreams, and is too big to hold such knowledge ; but 
brains like the Lady Joan’s are long and close and narrow, 
and shrewdly contain it. 

Lady Joan thought that only a fool never hedged. 

She liked her pleasures certainly, but she liked still better 
a good balance of many figures at Torlonia’s. Illness might 
come, disfigurement might come, accident might come ; age 
certainly would come. In those events lovers grow scarce, 
but the cosy swans’-downs and sables of society and a safe 
income will console for their absence. We weaker mortals 
may find an infinite sadness in the picture of Sophie Arnould, 
once the Goddess of Love of all Paris, sweeping in her 
trembling old age the snow away from her miserable door ; 
Sophie Arnould, once the lovely, the incomparable, the twin 
sister of the Graces, muttering, with the wind whistling round 
her withered limbs, of the dead days when all the Beau Si^cle 


FRIENDSHIP. 


77 


raved of the beauty of those feet and ankles ; but the Lady 
Joan would only have laughed and said, “Old ass ! she should 
have laid by her golden eggs while she got ’em.” Lady Joan 
felt that she herself would never derive any consolation for 
being the subject of other people’s tears ; she meant to live 
and die comfortably, and never sweep the streets for other 
people : so she hedged. 

Luckily for herself. Lady Joan had as many manners as 
there are changes in a child’s box of metamorphoses. Now 
and then, indeed, she overdid her part. Now and then she 
danced the Carmagnole, as one may say, by mistake, in her 
meeting-house clothes, or grinned when she should have pulled 
a long face. But on the whole she trimmed her candle 
cleverly, whether it had to be burned before the altar of the 
British Bona Bea, or whether it might flare as it liked among 
the dancing tapers of joyous Giovidi Grasso. 

On such occasions as this luncheon the Casa Cballoner was 
a temple of family felicity ; it had Bass’s beer and household 
harmony ; it had the “ Times” on the table, and said “ my 
love” every five minutes ; it had plain English cooking and 
simple English affections ; it talked politics from English points 
of view, and sighed that its general health compelled it to be 
out of dear old England so much. 

Indeed, if only Mr. Challoner could have managed to look 
a little less wooden, and Lady Joan would not now and then 
have put her tongue in her cheek and grinned with an “ aside” 
to her friend, the whole thing would have been perfect : even 
as it was it was masterly, especially when Mr. Challoner ex- 
plained, under his breath, “ a great friend of ours ; poor fel- 
low, his affairs were very involved, — estate going to rack and 
ruin. I think we have helped him, — yes, I may say we have 
helped him and when the Lady Joan, at the top of her 
table, sighed as she spoke of her beloved and lamented mother, 
talked a great deal — “so openly; oh, so openly!” as her 
guests said afterwards, “ there could be nothing in it” — of Fi- 
ordelisa and of its owner, who was like a brother to her and 
her husband, and made effective tableaux of maternal devotion 
with her little daughter, Effie, who was twelve years old and 
very timid and shy, but who contributed not a little to the 
effect of the entertainment, especially when, with Lady Joan’s 
arm round her, the little girl called the Prince loris “ lo.” 


78 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ An excellent creature, let them say what they like,” 
thought the bishop’s wife, whose c6U faible was motherly excel- 
lence. 

“ A very charming woman,” thought the bishop, while the 
Lady Joan listened, with her eyes brightly shining in most 
eager interest, to his account of his new system for the re- 
ligious supervision of ships’ crews, and displayed her thor- 
ough comprehension of his recent article in the “ Contemporary 
Review.” 

Luncheon over, she carried off the bishop and his wife and 
Mr. Challoner in a landau from a livery-stable, and drove them 
about on to the Pincio, and up and down the Corso, in the 
sight of the city, which was in itself sufficient to silence slan- 
derous tongues for a twelvemonth, and, bowing to her friends 
in the streets, with the shovel-hat in the front seat before her, 
felt she could go to as many masked balls as ever she liked 
with impunity. 

Then she went to tea with the bishop and his wife at their 
rooms in the Piazzi di Spagna, and met many English digni- 
taries and dowagers, and many demure spinsters, to whom she 
talked of all her great Scotch cousins, and told them the dear 
Hebrides had taken Villa Adriana, outside Porta Pia, and 
offered her assistance in a lottery for the building of another 
Protestant church within the gates, for which they were pe- 
titioning the Government. After that, having bored herself 
to death with estimable energy and endurance (for the root of 
her success lay in never showing that she was wearied), she 
justly thought she had earned her rest and recreation, and 
told her husband to go home without her, which he did obe- 
diently, and she lay back in her landau on the cushions so 
lately ecclesiastically sanctified, and laughed till she cried, and 
lighted a dozen cigarettes, and called for loris at his own 
house, and had a gay little dinner with him and three or four 
pets of hers, who accompanied her afterwards to the Capranica 
Theatre, and saw one of the wittiest and least decorous of the 
popular comedies, and amused herself vastly, and went home- 
ward singing snatches of airs in chorus, and so up-stairs into 
the Turkish room, where she sang more songs, with the guitar 
on her knee, and drank black coffee, and smoked, till the room 
was one dun-colored cloud such as was wont to hide from 
mortal eyes the tender hours of Jupiter. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


79 


Thus did she make her grave bow in the face of her Bona 
Dea and dance her mirthful capers behind her, in one and the 
same day, and make the best of both worlds and smoke her 
cigar at both ends. 


CHAPTER IX. 

It was four by the clock when loris found himself free to 
walk home across the intense blackness and the brilliant white- 
ness of Roman shadows and Roman moonlight. 

He drew his sables about him with a low sigh of relief as 
the porter closed the door behind him : he looked up at the 
stars, lighted a cigar, and paced homeward thoughtfully. 

He was so used to it all that he had ceased to think about 
it, but this night it had bored him : the songs heard five hun- 
dred times, the furtive glances that told so old a story to him, 
the jests, the inquiries, the insistant passion, — it was all so 
tiresome, and he was glad to get away from it and be by him- 
self quiet in the mild moonlit winter’s night. 

To loris. Nature had been kind, and Chance had been 
cruel. 

He was tall and slender of form with a delicate dark head, 
and a look of thoughtful and reticent calm which would have 
made the white monastic robes of a Dominican or the jewelled 
costume of a Louis Quinze courtier suit him better than the 
dress of the world that he wore. People looked at him far 
oftener than they did at still handsomer men. 

It was one of those faces which suggest the romance of 
fate, and his eyes under their straight classic brows and their 
drooping lids could gaze at women with a dreaming amorous 
meaning that would pour trouble into the purest virgin soul. 

Women never saw him for the first time without thinking 
of him when he had passed from sight. He had the charm 
of arousing at a first glance that vague speculative interest 
which once felt so easily grows little by little into love. loris 
was a man whom women always loved when he wished them 
to do so. 

He was a Roman and a patrician ; the purest blood and the 
most ancient lineage were his ; they were all that remained to 


80 


FRIENDSHIP. 


him of the vanished greatness of a race which had been 
second to none through a thousand centuries for valor, power, 
and all noble repute ; he had fought, he had travelled, he had 
studied ; he had the taste of an artist and the manner of a 
courtier ; he looked like a picture, and he moved like a king. 
He had an old estate and an income slender in comparison 
with his rank, but sufficient for his habits, which, though ele- 
gant, still were simple. He loved his country and his depend- 
ants, and was happy in the life of an Italian noble, which 
is, perhaps, as lovely a life as there is to be led in this world. 
Alas ! in an evil hour of his destiny the bold eyes of a new- 
comer, roving over the crowds of a court ball, had fallen on 
him, and his last hour of peace had then struck. 

When the Lady Joan first arrived from the East, life 
seemed to her grown very dull. It was before the season had 
begun ; the air was heavy, the streets empty ; she missed the 
red burning skies, she missed the fast desert scampers, she 
missed the noisy bazaars, she missed the camping out ; she felt 
dull and depressed ; the men around had not yet become her 
brothers ; she was in that mood which, when an Englishman 
is in it, makes men of other nationalities say of him “ that he 
wants something to kill.” Lady Joan wanted something to 
kill, and she found it. 

At various balls, when the season came on, she noticed a 
man who did not notice her. There was something in his 
slender grace and his delicate face, in his unrevealing eyes, in 
his cold glance, which fascinated her. What fascinated her 
much more was, that though when he bowed to other women 
his eyes were amorously soft and his laughter light and gay, 
his gaze if it chanced to light on her was chill and indifferent, 
and at all times he avoided her. In vain did she drift near 
him constantly, cast countless glances after him, waltz furiously 
past him, and flirt with his best friends ; he took no notice 
of her, and seemed rather repelled than attracted. One even- 
ing she, who was not easily baffled, insisted that he should be 
presented to her. He tried to avoid his fate, but it was writ- 
ten ; a friend, who cared more to please the imperious and 
handsome stranger from the banks of the Euphrates than to 
please him, entrapped him ; escape was no longer possible 
without looking like a boor. He was brought, bitterly against 
his will, to her side : he was called Ireneo, Prince loris. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


81 


“ She makes one think of a snake,” he thought. Some 
fancies of the Nile had entangled themselves with this new 
acquaintance in his mind. She was everything that he dis- 
liked in woman ; her voice seemed harsh to him, her gestures 
rough, her attitudes masculine, her look unfeminine. She 
had none of the soft charms of womanhood ; she danced ill, 
she dressed ill ; she was distasteful to him : she saw all that 
well enough, but she resolved to avenge it. 

She bade him call on her ; he could do no less. When he 
entered she seemed not to hear ; her head was resting on her 
hands ; she turned surprised and embarrassed ; there were 
tears in her eyes ; she spoke vaguely and hurriedly of quelques 
amertunies ; she hinted a vie incomprise ; she let fall a mur- 
mur of a mariage mal assorti. 

It startled him. 

To be astonished is in a sense to be interested. 

This woman, who waltzed so madly, rode so recklessly, and 
looked like a young black-browed hersagliere^ was not happy 
at heart, — had a brutal husband, — sighed restlessly for a 
happiness she had never known, — concealed weariness and bit- 
terness under the mask of a defiant courage and gayety ! The 
strange contrast of it arrested his attention, and she appeared 
to place confidence in him — a stranger who had for six months 
persistently avoided her — in a manner which perplexed as 
much as insensibly it flattered him. Men are always inclined 
to be pitiful to the woes of a woman when they are not woes 
which they themselves have caused. They will stone away 
without mercy a woman whom they themselves have wounded, 
but for the victim of another man they are quick to be moved 
to tenderness and indignation. 

The Lady Joan, knowing this, having in vain tried all other 
sorceries, took her attitude as a victim. Whenever she found 
any one who she thought would believe it, she always became 
the victim of Mr. Challoner and of the rapacity of her family, 
which had sacrificed her to a brute because he was a Croesus. 
To be sure, the riches were all left behind in the sands of 
Abana and Pharpar, and the brute was the most well-trained 
and patiently-enduring of marts complaisants ; but at this time 
the brute was absent in London, and her listener had never 
seen him, and of Croesus he was not incredulous, because 
an Englishman is always supposed to be one, and on the Con- 

D* 


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FRIENDSHIP. 


tinent is given an unlimited credit on account of that suppo- 
sition, of which he seldom fails to avail himself. 

When loris left her presence that day she had gained her 
point with him so far that, although she still half repelled she 
had begun to startle and interest him. His thoughts were 
busy with her : a woman need ask no more. As for herself, 
the Lady Joan’s pulses stirred as they had not done for many 
a day : the dulness and apathy that she had felt passed off her 
like a vapor; she had wanted something to kill, and she 
scented prey. Besides which, she was already in love. 

Her spirits rose at once she rang and ordered her horse. 
She rode with great courage and skill ; she flashed past loris 
like a meteor out of the gates to the open country. As he 
bowed to her in the sunset, he mused to himself, — 

“ Why did she confide in me ?” 

Season and vanity both could give him but one answer. 

There was a woman at that time who loved him well, and 
whom he had loved well also, — a countrywoman of his own. 
As he went to her, that night, he thought of those new strange 
darkling brows ; as he sat with her, she — whose stars and sun 
and heaven and earth he was — felt that his attention wan- 
dered and that his mind was absent. 

When a woman like the Lady Joan is in love, escape for 
him with whom she is in love is not easy. 

“ She has the stride of a carabineer, the feet of a contadina, 
the teeth of a gypsy, the eyes of a tigress, the manners of a 
fish-woman,” he told himself, and thought so; and yet, do 
what he would, he could not forget the strange glitter of those 
eyes ; he could not forget how he had seen this self-willed, 
daring, sun-browned rider from the Syrian Desert melted to 
tears and wooing his sympathy with hesitating words of con- 
fidence. 

The very strangeness of the contrast heightened its enigma 
for him. 

Long rides in the rosy summer hours, with the wind blow- 
ing over the flower-filled grasses ; early mornings, when he 
carried her knapsack for her in breezy pilgrimages to forest 
sanctuaries or mountain-heights ; lonely evenings, when the 
guitar was got out and the people’s ritornelli tried over to his 
teaching, with gay laughter and amorous gaze to suit the 
words ; late nights, when the Turkish tobacco was smoked, and 


FRIENDSHIP. 


83 


the Turkish songs sung, and the Turkish sequins glittered in 
the lamp-light on her dusky braids, and the shining fierce eyes 
glistened with fervid invitation and flashed with eloquent 
meaning, — one by one these succeeded each other with fever- 
ish rapidity until their work was done, and he was whirled into 
a fancy as sensual as her own, if not as durable, and lost him- 
self in it for a brief while, and woke to find the chains fast- 
locked about him and his place assigned to him for good and 
aye in the triangle of the Casa Challoner. 

Of course gradually he became aware that the Croesus was a 
gentleman not too well off, and very fond of speculating in 
whatever chanced to come in his way, from railway companies 
to Capo di Monte cups, and that the brute was a person who 
would dine with him every evening and be shrouded amicably 
behind a newspaper after dinner, — who would grumble and 
quarrel certainly about the soup or the salt or the servants, 
but who would never by any chance ask him if he had a pref- 
erence for pistols or swords. 

Of course little by little he became aware that a good many 
fictions had been spread out for his attraction, and that if any 
one were a victim in the household it certainly was not the 
Lady Joan. Little by little he saw all this byplay and all the 
shifts and straits with which the Casa Challoner was kept 
straight in the world’s eyes ; and he grew so used to the in- 
ventiveness of his mistress that when she did chance to speak 
the truth he never believed her. But to all this knowledge 
he only came by such slow degrees that he grew used to it as 
it stole upon him ; and in her passion for him he could not 
choose but believe : it was too jealous, too violent, too exact- 
ing, too terribly ever-present with him, for him to have a 
chance of doubting its vitality and reality. 

There were times when his own exhausted passion roused 
itself, with infinite effort and with a weariness that was almost 
repugnance, to respond to the unending insistance and undying 
fires of hers. 

A woman who is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man than 
the woman who is fire to his ice. There is hope for him in 
the one, but only a dreary despair in the other. The ardors 
that intoxicate him in the first summer of his passion serve 
but to dull and chill him in the later time. 

loris, in certain passing mood, would think almost with a 


84 


FRIENDSHIP. 


shudder, “ Heavens ! will she insist on these transports for- 
ever ?” 

This evening, walking homeward, he felt tired of the day, 
tired of the evening. He had had so many like them. 

He knew the songs by heart, and the smiles too. The rou- 
tine of the hours, so carefully balanced between the decorum 
that imposed on the little world she studied and the amusement 
and abandonment that were the real delights of her nature, 
seemed to him wearisome and vapid. It was always the same 
thing. She could take a genuine zest in the small Tartuflferies 
of the tea-parliament ; she could take a sincere delight in the 
jokes of the Capranica and the jests at Spillman’s. She had 
this supreme advantage, — she loved the life she led in both its 
extremes. But he did not. 

He had a contempt for the conventicle ; he was tired of the 
theatre. He bore his share in both psalm and play because he 
had grown into the habit of doing anything that she dictated 
to him. But all the same he had too much good taste not to 
be tired of both. 

He walked through the dusky shadows and across the wide 
white squares to his own little house on the bank of the river, 
down by the Piazza del Gesu. He let himself in, took the 
lamp that was burning in the entrance, and went up the stair- 
case to his own favorite chamber. 

The house was cumbered with busts and bronzes, and rolls 
of old tapestries and rococo, bits of china and carving, and 
broken fragments of sculpture. For it was in a manner the ware- 
house of the Casa Challoner, which could itself not decorously 
be strewn about with more things than would look natural. 

He went up to his own room and threw his coat off and 
lighted a cigar. It was a pretty room, looking on a garden 
that in spring was green with lemon- and orange-trees, and 
had an old statue or two in it, and a wide-arched loggia hung 
with creeping plants. 

There was one portrait on the wall, among landscapes and 
weapons and etchings, relics of the time when he had been an 
art-student at San Luc’s and a duellist in gray old Pisa. 

It was a portrait with an Egyptian profile, a classic head, a 
cruel jaw, and a hard mouth : he glanced up at it and turned 
away with a sort of restless impatience at its presence there. 

Indeed, it had no place of right there, — being, as it was. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


85 


the portrait of another man’s wife. But it was not this 
scruple which troubled or distracted him. It had hung there 
for several seasons. 

What made him feel impatient of it now was, that for the 
first time it occurred to him, with a chill, that throughout all 
the days of his life he would never be able to escape from the 
staring watchfulness of those menacing eyes. 

He was like one of those magicians of fable who, having 
mastered spirits of good and evil for many a year in safety, 
at last summon from the nether world a spirit that defies his 
spells to banish it again, and abides with him, to his misery, 
growing stronger than himself. 

This night he turned restlessly and uneasily from the gaze 
of the portrait, moved his lamp so that the picture was left 
in darkness, and took out from his book-shelves some old 
numbers of a great European review. He searched through 
them until he found certain poems signed “ Etoilc.” 

He sat reading until the lamp grew dim and the sparrows 
in his garden below began to twitter at the approach of dawn. 

“ Can it be possible that this woman has never known what 
love is?” he said to himself, as he shut the book and went to 
his bed. 

The morning had risen. 


CHAPTER X. 

“I WONDER what Voigh tel has told her?” thought the 
Lady Joan to herself on the morrow. 

She felt a little uneasy,— just as she had used to feel under 
the gaze of the great explorer’s green spectacles on the house- 
top in Damascus, when the champagne was in the ice-pails 
and Mr. Challoner in his counting-house, and Voigh tel’s little 
cynical, self-complaisant chuckle had sounded scarcely more 
welcome to her than if it had been the hiss of a cobra. She 
was uncomfortably conscious that Voigh tel knew much more 
of her than was agreeable to herself; besides, he was the 
bosom friend of that brilliant politician who had been trustee 
to her marriage-settlements. 


8 


86 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ I dare say she knows everything, and I’m sure she’s good 
for nothing,” she reflected at noonday; thereupon she dressed 
herself in her best, took out of her wardrobe with her Astra- 
khan furs an admirable manner — frank but not free, blunt but 
not bold, cordial and good-natured and high-spirited — which 
she kept on hand for people with whom it was not necessary 
to don the meeting-house clothes, yet with whom it might be 
dangerous to dress quite en ddbardeur ; and thus arrayed, with 
her pleasantest smile shining honestly in her gray eyes, she 
drove herself across the city to the old palace by the Colonna 
Gardens, in which the Comtesse d’Avesnes had established 
herself on the previous day, and, flnding her at home, would 
take no denial from Etoile, but insisted on the friend of her 
father and of dearest Voightel passing the rest of the day 
with her. It would be such a charity. She was quite alone. 
She said that Mr. Challoner was gone to Orbetello, and lo — 
poor lo — was obliged to bore himself all day at the court 
with some newly-arrived foreign potentate. 

“ Of course she must have led the very deuce of a life ; 
but nobody would ever think it to look at her,” the Lady Joan 
reflected in perplexity as she surveyed her guest at her own 
breakfast-table. She was quite honest in her conviction. 
Given a woman with every opportunity to — amuse — herself, 
why, of course the woman had — amused — herself ; every idiot 
knew that. 

She did not like her guest. She could not make her out ; 
she was irritated by her own suspicions that Voightel had told 
her disagreeable things ; and though she liked patronizing 
artists she did not care for artists of European celebrity when 
they were of her own sex, and were as proud as Lucifer, as 
she said angrily to herself, and looked round her rooms with 
eyes that seemed to her to detect at a glance the china that 
was mended, the canvases that were restored, the antiquities 
that had been made yesterday, and the Certosina that had 
been glued together last week. Nevertheless she made herself 
charming, — got out some really good things, which she was 
never without in case any real connoisseur should happen to 
call, and, over the plump quails and light wines of her break- 
fast-table, was the very model of a clever, good-humored, can- 
did, and hospitable hostess. 

No one could play the part better than she when she liked j 


FRIENDSHIP. 


87 


and Etoile, won by her cordial good humor and bright intelli- 
gence, reflected that Voightel when he was prejudiced could 
be very unjust. Great men can be so, as well as little ones, 
sometimes. 

“ Dear old Voightel !” said the Lady Joan, fervently. “ I 
am so fond of him ! People call him a cynic ; but I’m sure 
his heart’s in the right place. He was like a father to me in 
Damascus.” 

She had hated Voightel, as a woman who loves adventures, 
yet wishes nobody to know that she has any, does hate a grim 
old ironical on-looker, with keen eyes watching through his 
spectacles and the raciest humor in Christendom, on whom 
all her prettiest fictions and sharpest devices fall harmless as 
feathers on bronze. But she had always met Voightel with 
both hands extended and the pleasantest of smiles. “ Ah, 
lieber mein Herr!'" she would always say to him, with the 
frankest delight, when they crossed each other in any of the 
cities of Europe. And Voiglitel would go and dine with her 
and enjoy his dinner, — as, indeed, there was no reason that he 
should not ; for it does not matter if you think very ill things 
of a woman, so long as she is good-looking and makes a fuss 
with you. 

“ She would pounce on me like a tiger-cat if she dared,” 
Voightel would think to himself, as she smiled on him and 
gave him mocha, Turkish fashion, and prepared with her own 
hands for him his water-pipe. And it tickled his fancy so 
much that he was always at his pleasantest with her ; so that, 
though she knew that he did not believe in her one bit, she 
was quite sure that he liked her. 

So runs the world away ; and so, among all the spiders 
cheating all the flies, a spider makes a meal for another spider 
now and then. 

Etoile, as she heard Voightel’s praises, felt almost guilty 
for the guilty and absent man who had called this ardent and 
grateful friend of his the “ Prose of Rome.” 

Before she could reply, there entered the Count Mimo Bur- 
letta, plump and busy, his mouth full of new scandals and his 
hands full of new laces. 

“ Am I in your way ? Is that your tailor ?” asked Etoile of 
her hostess, in perfect good faith, not recognizing him by day- 
light, and only seeing the filmy heaps of the laces he carried. 


88 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Lady Joan laughed, frowned, whispered hurriedly that he 
was an old friend, — very poor, — snubbed the ill-timed visitor 
and his laces, and dismissed him ; then, thinking better of it, 
she ran after him into the anteroom and consoled him, and 
told him, with a smile, that the Comtesse d’ Avesnes had taken 
him for a man-milliner. 

“ Maladetta sia swore Burletta, dropping his laces in his 
rage, till he looked like a large fat ram dropping its fleece. 
“ Maladetta sia 

“ With all my heart !” laughed the J^ady Joan, and returned 
to her drawing-room, taking a piece of yellow Venetian point 
with her as a reason for her absence in the anteroom. 

“ A collar of Marino Faliero’s,” she said, as she entered. 
“ Isn’t it interesting ? Perhaps the very one he was executed 
in : who knows ?” 

“Who knows, indeed?” said Etoile, with a smile. “But 
why not say Desdemona’s at once? It would be more 
poetic.” 

The Lady Joan threw the lace aside crossly. She had a 
suspicion that Voightel’s friend was laughing at her, and she 
did not like to be laughed at ; moreover, she preferred people 
who believed in Faliero, or in anything else that she might 
choose to tell them. 

She had some odds and ends of real art and real history 
jumbled together in her brain like the many-colored snips and 
shreds in a tailor’s drawer in Spain. But they were all 
tumbled about pell-mell, and the wrong colors came up at the 
wrong time ; and she had so unfortunate a preference for 
always dragging in the very biggest names and the very grand- 
est events upon every occasion, that her adorer, Mimo Burletta, 
who really was learned in such matters, was constantly made 
very nervous by her blunders. 

“ La Challoner is beautiful, noble, chaste, — a very pearl 
and queen of women,” he would say, in his enthusiasm about 
her. “ But she makes one little, very little mistake : a pot 
baked yesterday is always a vase of Maestro Giorgio’s; all 
her fiddles are Cremonas ; all her sprigged china is Saxe, all 
her ugly plates are Palissy’s ; all her naked people are Michael 
Angelo’s ; all her tapestries are Gobelin ; all her terra-cottas 
are Pentelic marbles. Now, that is a mistake, you know : 
the world is too little for so very much treasure. She forgets 


FRIENDSHIP. 


89 


that she makes her diamonds as cheap as pebbles. But she 
is a divine creature for all that,” would the loyal Mimo always 
cry, in conclusion. 

At this moment she looked at the lace with regret. It was 
very yellow, very full of holes, and not very much coarser 
than what the women make every day along the Riviera. Why 
would her guest not believe in it ? 

“Would you mind driving me about to-day?” she said, 
glancing at the clock, reflecting that she might as well get 
something in return for this breakfast. “ The ponies are tired. 
Mine ? — no, they’re not mine exactly ; they’re lo’s ; but of 
course I have them whenever I like. Yes, they’re nice little 
beasts, — little Friuli nags, — fast as steam and sure-footed as 
goats. They’re very useful. Will you drive me? Thanks. 
Perhaps you will go with me to a few studios, if you don’t 
mind ? Of course it will bore you ; you’ll find it all second- 
rate ; but to have your opinion will be such a treat to me and 
such an honor to them ! Are you ready ?” 

Of course she carried her point and got into her guest’s 
carriage and began a round of visits. She was not quite the 
Lady Joan of the bib-and-tucker, nor was she quite the Lady 
Joan of the loup-and-domino, but the same adroit mixture of 
the two that she had been throughout luncheon. 

She was sincere in her eager invitation : she had a genuine 
zest in exhibiting any celebrity in her companionship. It 
gave her a cachet of talent. She liked to afiPect artistic society ; 
her family had always done so ; only, where they had had all 
that was greatest in all Europe to choose from, she had to take 
such ofishoots of intellectual power as she could obtain. 
Sculptors who thought it high art to imitate, in stone, school- 
boys and sucking babes, cloth trousers and silk gowns ; painters 
who cut color like butter and like butter spread it with a knife, 
then called the mass a chord in color or a prelude in carmine ; 
clever writers who appraised their age aright, and saw that it 
needed not high purpose nor high thought, and trained their 
gifts accordingly, and, instead of dying like Keats or Buckle, 
took good incomes from great newspapers, and were not too 
clever for their peace or price : these and their like she would 
get round her, and make them useful to her in many ingenious 
ways. 

But whenever a great fame came within her reach she 
8 * 


90 


FRIENDSHIP. 


grasped it eagerly, and always was the first to ask it out to 
dinner. 

These pastilles of art and intellect burned in her rooms 
gave it a fine aroma, and she liked people to run about and 
say, “ I met Pietra Infernale there last night ; he means to 
have his illustrated ‘ Furioso’ ready by New Year;” or “I 
dined at the Challoners’, to see the Russian novelist, Sacha 
Silchikofi*, — wicked, if you like, but then how witty !” or, 
“ I lunched yesterday with Lady Joan, and met Tom Tonans : 
he says there is no art nowadays in the R. A., — nothing but 
millinery and nursery elegiacs.” 

This kind of thing gave her house a smell of the Muses and 
the Graces, and took off any possible likeness it might other- 
wise have had to a hric-d-brac shop. Therefore having now 
secured the friend of Voightel for all the remaining daylight 
of a fine mild afternoon, she drove up and down many streets, 
and went in and out many studios, smoked a cigarette here 
and there, and finally, at five o’clock, thought it better to wind 
up with a little tableau of respectability, and begged to stop 
before an old dark house in an old dark quarter. 

“ I must make you know my dear friends the Scrope-Stairs,” 
she said, entreatingly. “ It’s their day, and I promised I 
would bring you if I could. You won’t mind coming, to 
oblige me? I’ve told them so much about you. They’re 
such dear, good, clever people ; and they’re dying to see you, 
— dying!” 

With which she went through the dusky doorway and 
began to mount steps innumerable and very steep and dark. 
Etoile followed her, unwilling to seem discourteous in such a 
trifle, and willing to please Lord Archie's daughter when she 
could. 

“ I’ve told lo to meet me here. The Scrope-Stairs are so 
fond of him,” said the Lady Joan, as she clambered up with 
agility to the fourth floor. “ Oh, yes, it is an awful height ; 
but they are so very ill off, poor dear people. Dear old Lord 
George managed to make ducks-and-drakes of five fortunes.” 

She interrupted herself to put aside a dingy tapestry, and 
led the way through ill-lit passages to a large, dim, naked- 
looking chamber, where there were congregated in solemn 
congress some forty or fifty ladies of that age once described 
as somewhere between twenty and sixty, whose centre of at- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


91 


traction was a tea-table, about which they revolved as planets 
round a sun. 

“ How do you do, dears?” cried Lady Joan, kissing a great 
many of them one after another with ardent effusion. “Is lo 
come? No? Oh, just like him! Ah, I beg your pardon ; 
how careless I am 1 Yes, I have persuaded her, you see. 
Let me present you to my friend the Comtesse d’Avesnes. 
You know her best as Etoile. Allow me ” 

Lady Joan saw an electric shock of amazement, a nervous 
thrill of curiosity mingled with terror, palpitate through all 
her assembled friends at the name of Etoile, — such a tremor 
of trepidation as thrills through a dovecote when in the blue 
sky hovers a hawk. 

She enjoyed it amazingly. 

Though so careful to conciliate Mrs. Grundy, she cordially 
detested that august personage, and loved to “ tie a cracker to 
her tail,” as she phrased it, whenever she could do so with 
impunity. 

“ So honored, so enchanted, so more than flattered ! For 
years you have been our idol I” murmured the youngest of the 
Scrope-Stair sisters, in a twitter of excitement, whilst old 
Lord George wandered in and made his dignified old Regency 
bow, and put his glasses to his dim eyes and turned a pretty 
compliment for sake of Etoile. 

“ But will not people think it a little odd to see her in our 
house?” murmured the youngest sister, Marjory, a thin, eager 
person, with a fringe of hair above a nervous face ; whilst her 
father occupied Etoile. Lady Joan filled her mouth with 
tea-cake. 

“ Oh, no, dear; she goes everywhere : she’s hand-and-glove 
with Princess Vera. Of course there are very queer stories ; 
but you know I’m never censorious. Where on earth can lo 
be?” 

Marjory Scrope colored: she always did so at a certain 
name. 

“ We have not seen him yet to-day,” she murmured. “ As 
for your friend, I am delighted. Only I thought Mrs. Mid- 
dleway looked a little — a little — astonished. But you know 
best always, darling Joan; and any one dear Lord Archie 
recommends ” 

Mrs. Middleway was the wife of one of those Anglican 


92 


FRIENDSHIP. 


clergymen whose flocks are all the straying Protestant sheep, 
black and white, who dance their cotillons, enjoy their mas- 
querades, play their roulette, drink their pick-me-ups, propi- 
tiate heaven with their bazaars, and shriek at trumpery French 
plays, all over Italy in the winter-time, and of whom the 
Roman shepherd, or the Neapolitan beggar, or the Tuscan 
vine-dresser, staring sullenly at them as they fly by on horse- 
back, will generally mutter, “ Non sono Christani.” 

Mrs. Middleway was a large, faded, shabby woman, with 
two daughters to marry. She was extremely particular as to 
whom she visited, and had a very small income. She would 
stay at Fiordelisa in the summer, and if any one hinted that, 
“ Well, yes — well, was it not rather — rather strange, you 
know?” Mrs. Middleway would reply, “The dear Challoners? 
Oh, what a cruel censorious world we live in ! As if the very 
openness of the friendship were not sufficient guarantee ! 
Why, Lady Hebrides lunched there yesterday : I met her !” 

But Mrs. Middle way, being the soul of propriety, and hav- 
ing two daughters to marry, looked askance at the entrance of 
a celebrated person, whose name she was inclined to think 
synonymous with Tophet, — wondered what that brown velvet 
gown had cost, drew herself up a little stiffer than usual, and 
murmured to her neighbor that that sweet Lady Joan was 
always so imprudently kind-hearted ; Lady Joan, judging by 
her own noble self, never would believe there could be any- 
thing wrong anywhere. 

The neighbor, who was a very solemn spinster, with blue 
spectacles, who had written a very learned book upon the 
Privileges and Penalties of the Vestals, murmured back that 
society was so mixed nowadays that it was really dangerous 
to enter it at all ; one never knew whom one might not be 
exposed to meeting. 

“ Ah, no ; you may well say so. There is no line drawn,” 
said the clergyman’s wife, with a sigh, as she broke a tea-cake. 
“ What can society be without a line ?” 

And she smoothed her shabby silk gown, and, good Chris- 
tian though she was, could not help disliking a woman who 
wore brown velvet, silver-fox fur, and silk-embroidered cash- 
meres, and had old Mechlin lace at the hem of her skirt. 

To the Countess of Hebrides such vanities were permis- 
sible ; they were, like other evidences of the favoritism of 


FRIENDSHIP. 


93 


Providence, not to be questioned in justice or propriety. But 
on only an artist ! 

“ When one thinks how they must have been purchased 1” 
she murmured to the spinster who had written the learned 
book on the penalties of the Vestals. 

The spinster shook her head. 

ii Very wrong of Lady Joan to have brought her,” she 
said, in a severe and choleric whisper. “ Here one always was 
safe.” 

“Dear Lady Joan! she is so imprudent and so good- 
natured 1” sighed Mrs. Middleway, and had her feelings fur- 
ther harrowed by a glimpse of the old Mechlin lace of the 
halaycuse underneath the immoral brown velvet of Etoile. 

The glimpse she got of the Mechlin halayeuse filled her 
with a kind of savage pain. Real old Mechlin ! — sweeping 
the dust 1 These were the kinds of things that made it at 
times almost hard even for a chaplain’s wife to believe in a 
beneficent Creator. 

Meanwhile, Etoile, unconscious of the emotions she excited, 
smiled on the antiquated homage of Lord George, wondered 
why she had been brought to this parliament of dames, and 
remained as indifferent to the stare of the fifty ladies as she 
was to the erowd on the Pincio, or to the mostrari digito at 
all times. The mill-clack of tongues grew very quiet round 
her ; the tea did not circulate briskly, the muffins were not 
buttered with honeyed welcome; they did not like to talk 
before her ; she had come from Paris, and had the reputation 
of a wit. Altogether, she made them very uncomfortable. 

“ So kind of Lady Joan 1” whispered the clergyman’s wife. 
“ And so kind of the Stairs ! — they always were kindness 
itself ; but it is a pity, because to this house every one has 
always thought they were quite safe in bringing their daugh- 
ters. Yes, a mistake certainly, though well meant, no doubt ; 
but when one has young girls can one be too careful ?” 

“ Delighted to have had the honor of receiving so much 
genius and so much brilliancy into my sad old house,” said 
quivering old Lord George, with a bow of Bi-uramel’s time 
and his hand on his heart. He was a feeble old man, but had 
been very handsome in his time, and still knew a woman to 
his taste when he saw one. Lady Joan was not to his taste: 
only he never dared say so in his daughters’ hearing. 


94 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ So charmed to have had such an honor, and any use we 
can be, — and we may be allowed to call, may we not ? — and 
pray remember our Thursdays, — every Thursday till June, — 
though we may hardly hope that you will deign,” etc., etc., 
said Marjory, in her most fervent manner, her beads and 
her trinkets and her spare figure and her little rings of hair 
all eager with courtesy. 

Under these cordial valedictions Etoile went to her carriage 
wondering why she had been taken to these excellent folks. 

Lady Joan’s brow was stormy : it was half-past five, and her 
friend, the Prince loris, had not come. 

She loved to take him there, — in the first place because it 
wearied him to death, and in the second because it amused her 
extremely to stride into that circle of “ goody-goodies,” as she 
termed them, with her hands in her pockets and her prince at 
her heels. The incongruity of it tickled her fancy, and she 
knew how well it served her for all these matrons and spinsters 
to cry in chorus to any calumniators that she might have, 
“ Oh ! the purest friendship ! The most innocent intercourse ! 
Why, those excellent Scrope-Stairs receive them together ! — 
as if they ever would, if there were,'^ etc., etc. 

The Scrope-Stair sisters were charmed to have him brought 
there at any price : he was their one court-card, their one riband 
of grace and honor. The “ sex of valor” was never repre- 
sented in their rooms save by some clergyman, or missionary, 
or unwary traveller caught in his ignorance, or on occasion by 
Mr. Silverly Bell, if he had any particular enemy that he de- 
sired to drown in the teapot, with Mrs. Grundy to say the 
“ De Profundis” over the defunct. 

Lord and Lady George Scrope-Stair, with their daughters, 
were the chief mainstay and prop to that Temple of All the 
Virtues which Lady Joan had set herself to build. They 
were, indeed, very poor, but in compensation they were so 
eminently — so pre-eminently — respectable ! 

Not because their names were in “ Debrett” and “ Burke,” 
— plenty of scamps are in both who will hurt you very much 
if you are seen with them, — but because from their fourth 
floor there went out an eternal odor of the very severest 
morality. 

To have sipped of the tea from their teapot was to have 
been baptized with the waters of respectability for life, and to 


FRIENDSHIP. 


95 

have eaten of their muffins was to have been sealed with the 
seal of purity for all time. True, their teapot was terrible as 
the caldron of Macbeth’s weird sisters, and hissed till youth 
and innocence, excellence and genius and honor, were all stew- 
ing, cold, drowned things, in its steam. But what of that ? 
Mrs. Grundy does not mind a little scandal, — if you will only 
whisper it. 

Lord George had been a dandy and a beau when the cen- 
tury and himself were both young ; he had had big fortunes 
and spent them all, and had lived many years in exile, a sad 
and broken man, shivering by his chilly stove, and tottering 
out when the day was fine to have a mild little joke, when his 
daughters were out of hearing and any chance word awoke 
the old memories in him, as a trumpet-call wakes the spirit in 
the worn-out charger waiting death wearily between the wagon’s 
shafts. 

In his own house his daughters cowed him ; they were iron 
to him, though wax to the rest of the world, — taking in the 
word’s eternal comedy those indispensable but subordinate 
roles known in stage-talk as “ utility parts.” 

They were plain, perfidious; but the people they 

toadied and the friends they flattered rather liked them the 
better for this. 

If anybody wanted a school-girl looked after, a bore taken 
off their hands, a disagreeable errand done, or a train met on 
a rainy day, there were the Scrope-Stairs to do it. 

Provided you were only quite a proper person, you could 
always have a Scrope Stair to do what you wanted, — from 
ringing your bell to slandering your enemy, from pouring out 
your tea to escorting your coffin. Their usefulness was of an 
elasticity quite inexhaustible, and their ingenuity in consola- 
tory sophisms was as great as that of the chamberlain of Marie 
Leczinska, who, when she longed to play cards on the day of 
a funeral, assured her that the game of piquet was deep mourn- 
ing. And, considering what a comfort they were, the Scrope- 
Stairs were not expensive : some drives, some dinners, some 
visits to you in the summer, some boxes at the opera in the 
winter, — with these trifles these treasures were secured. 

Lady Joan, whose unerring eye for her own advantage 
never misled her, had discerned the capabilities and the advan- 
tages of friendship with these excellent persons when first 


96 


FRIENDSHIP. 


she had wintered in Italy. She saw that they had not, like her, 
the power to make all men their brothers, but that they were 
exactly what was wanted to induce Society to let her enjoy 
herself with her brothers. Determined, like the spirited woman 
she was, to dance her Carmagnole over the conventionalities, 
she saw the necessity of having somebody to swear that she 
was only curtsying, and not dancing at all. So she instantly 
rushed into devoted friendship, kissed them all at every meet- 
ing, and wrote them a dozen times a week sugary little notes 
beginning “ Dearest darling” and ending “ With a thousand 
loves.” 

It was not the style that suited her best, but she could do 
it when it was wanted. 

This effervescence had cooled down a little by this time, 
but it had left a valuable residuum : the froth was gone, but 
the wine remained. 

The Scrope-Stairs hkd found out what her “thousand loves” 
were worth, but they kept their knowledge to themselves, and, . 
pouring out her tea on their Thursdays, continued to kiss and 
be kissed. 

The loyalty of the Scrope-Stairs (whom the profane jesters 
of Society would call the Sweep-Stairs) was quite priceless in 
its unutterable value to the Casa Challoner. Indeed, but for 
the Scrope-Stair friendship Society might perhaps never have 
been friendly. But these young persons were so well-born, so 
decorous, so eminently estimable, so sternly respectable, and so 
stiffly irreproachable, that they really could have made Society 
accept even odder things than Fiordelisa, and stranger things 
than the Lady Joan, with her hands in her coat-pockets and her 
lovers behind her, striding in to a clergyman’s tea-party. 

They were, it is true, very jealous, very curious, very cruel, 
could slander viciously, toady rapaciously, and injure irrepar- 
ably ; but these were trifles, and were, indeed, quite lost sight 
of under the throng of amiable qualities which they developed 
for people richer than themselves. Their moral qualities were 
their strong point ; they were armed cap-d-pU in every kind 
of virtue ; they bad even charity, — when they were paid very 
well for it. 

The old folks did not very cordially join in the charity. 
They belonged to an old-fashioned school, and did not under- 
stand the conqjrchensivcness of modern friendship, which 


FRIENDSHIP. 97 

means anything anybody likes, from rapturous love to deadly 
hate. 

But their money was spent, their daughters were formidable, 
their home was dreary, and so they obediently did as they were 
told, and the old courtier put on his faded red riband to grace 
Lady Joan’s respectable parties, and the old wife carried her 
knitting-needles and lambs’-wool on to the terrace at Fiordelisa; 
and all was as it should be, and their venerable names and 
persons were as towers of strength built up beside the Casa 
Challoner. 

A bolder woman would not have cared for these things, and 
a sillier woman would not have known their value ; but Lady 
Joan was not above using these trifles and turning them to 
good account. Even an old red riband, and a pair of knitting- 
needles, she knew were not weapons to be despised in her 
battle of life. 

Lady Joan was like that well-trained elephant which can 
at will root up an oak or pick up a pin; and Lady Joan knew 
that there are many more pins than oaks, and that a* pin 
stamped on too hastily may lame even an elephant for life. 
So nothing was too small for her, wise woman that she was. 

A pattern of a new pinafore for an anxious mother; a 
damascened scimetar lent for a tableau vivant ; a compliment 
at the right minute to an ugly woman ; a young baritone 
allowed to scream himself hoarse over her guitar ; a shoddy 
Croesus dazzled with the statesmen and the duchesses in her 
photograph-book ; a frank, beaming smile in the face of a bore; 
a pressing invitation to a nervous nonenity; a flattering defer- 
ence to a wealthy pomposity ; a pretty set of conventionalities 
put on stilF and new like her ruffs and her cuffs ; a present of 
fruit to folks rich enough to buy up Hesperides ; a loan of 
the pony-carriage to people who owned great studs and rare 
racers in Suffolk or Norfolk ; nothing wasted, nothing thrown 
away, every one conciliated, everything remembered, — herein 
was her success. She beamed on the old folks and the rich 
folks, no matter how they bored her, because they were solid 
as bullion, bought pictures, and were the St. Peters of the 
gates of Society. And she beamed on the young ones and 
the poor ones, because who could tell what they might not 
turn out to be some day? The corporal’s knapsack may hold 
the marshal’s truncheon, and a little lad once trotted about 


98 


FRIENDSHIP. 


with baskets of washed linen who lived to be King of Sweden. 
Thus she got her paeans sung in all stages of society, and 
broke down her oaks and picked up her pins and made her 
path clear, and endured an amount of ennui incalculable, and 
listened radiantly to platitudes interminable, and made herself 
as agreeable to poor little Doremi screaming his cadenza and 
talking of his theatrical future, as to solemn Sir Joseph, with 
the face of a pig and the art-knowledge of a butler, and a 
huge art gallery in England, smelling of paint and plaster, 
and requiring many framed acres of “ Guidos, Correggios, and 
stuff.” 

Of course all this cost her trouble, unending trouble. But 
she kept foremost before her the final words of Candide, “ II 
faut cultiver notre jardin.” She had a passion-flower in her 
garden, of course; but her real care and culture were her 
cabbages. 

She enjoyed her cabbages as much as her passion-flowers. 

Whether she were sending her horse at racing pace across 
the grass that covers the dead Etruscan cities, or waltzing at 
topmost speed down the vast palace ballrooms, or bargaining 
for old gems in dusky cellars of the Trastevere, or outwitting 
the Ghettos in the purchase of brocades and canopies, or 
smiling in the faces of haughty or witty women whom she 
hated, or swinging through the feathered maize to call the 
lazy peasants to their duties, or launching shafts of malice 
through her black satin vizor at the Veglione, — whatever it 
was that she was doing she did it with zest and force, and 
with a reality of enjoyment that was contagious. 

Here was the secret of her success. To her nothing was 
little. 

This temper is always popular with Society. To enjoy 
yourself in the world is, to the world, the prettiest of indirect 
compliments. 

The chief offence of the poet,^ as of the philosopher, is that 
the world as it is fails to satisfy him. 

Society, which is after all only a conglomerate of hosts, has 
the host’s weakness : all its guests must smile. 

The poet sighs, the philosopher yawns. Society feels that 
they depreciate it. Society feels more at ease without them. 

To find every one acceptable to you is to make yourself 
acceptable to every one. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


99 


Hived bees get sugar because they will give back honey. 
All existence is a series of equivalents. 

“What do you think of my dear friends?” asked Lady 
Joan, as they drove away. 

Etoile hardly knew what to say. 

“ No doubt they are very estimable persons,” she answered. 
“But, I admit, a society like that is hardly what I am used to. 
I counted thirty-eight ladies, very ill dressed, who I am sure 
were all muttering, ‘ Apage, Satanas,’ and most of them looked 
in a fierce state of warfare with a world which had failed to 
appreciate and — to marry them.” 

Lady Joan laughed. 

“ Oh, they’re horrid old cats ; I quite agree with you there. 
But cats scratch, you know. It’s best to coax them. As for 
the dear Scrope-Stairs, I assure you to know them is to admire 
them, they are so indefatigable, so true, so charitable. I love 
them all so much 1” she added, with an irrepressible grin on 
her handsome face. “ Besides, you know, women are so use- 
ful : haven’t you ever found that out yet ?” 

“ No ; perhaps because I want nothing of them.” 

Lady Joan decided in her own mind that Voightel mmt 
have told her everything. Voightel never had ; but conscience 
is a magic-lantern that throws distorted figures on any white 
blank wall. 

“ I think you are wrong,” she answered, aloud, with the 
odd candor which sometimes characterized this woman, who 
perhaps had been born for better things than she had achieved. 
“I think you are wrong. Nobody knows what they may want. 
Things hinge so horribly on accident. People who used to 
snub Louis Napoleon thought themselves quite safe; they 
were always afraid he should borrow a sovereign. I knew a 
man who gave him a drop of sherry out of a flask in a hunt- 
ing-field after he had had a heavy fall one day in Leicester- 
shire ; and twenty years afterwards that very drop of sherry 
got the man a concession for public works that brought him in 
half a million of money. There !” 

“ But surely he gave the sherry out of good nature, not 
calculation ?” 

“ Humph ! I don’t know. He was not the sort of man 
to stop his horse to pick up a farmer. At any rate, he did 
the civil thing, and see what he got by it. Now, that is just 


100 


FRIENDSHIP. 


what I mean by being civil to women. They bore you ; well, 
they bore me. I don’t deny that. But they can do one so 
much good : just for a drop of sherry they can get you such 
a big concession.” 

“ You would make a good political leader,” said Etoile, with 
a smile. 

Lady Joan was flattered ; though perhaps she would not 
have been so much so had she seen into her companion’s 
thoughts. 

Etoile descended at her own resting-place and sent her 
horses home with Lady Joan, who, when out of her hearing, 
had them turned in the direction of the house of loris. 

“ The Prince not home yet ?” she said, sharply, to his ser- 
vant. “ Well, tell him I’ve been here; and tell him if he’s 
not in at half-past seven he’ll get no dinner : we shan’t wait 
for him.” 

The servant bowed humbly, and in his soul prayed heaven 
to send his master’s dama an accidente. 

Then she had herself borne again along the twilit Corso 
homeward, and laughed as she lay back among the cushions 
recalling the faces of the thirty-eight matrons and virgins 
around the sacred sun of the tea-urn. 

“ How scared they looked !” she thought to herself. “ Well, 
it may all come in useful some day.” 

For Lady Joan was a long-sighted woman. 

When Etoile went up her wide steps into the great palace, 
pale and melancholy with Overbeck’s frescoes, she saw a coat 
lined with fur lying on the couch of the antechamber, and in 
the dusk of her rooms, that were filled with the aromatic scent 
of the wood fires, and burning pine-cones, a slender hand was 
held out to her, and a soft, melodious voice said : 

“ Will you forgive me that I ventured to wait for you? I 
could not bear to be turned away a second time.” 

The dark, delicate head of the Prince loris was seen fitfully 
in the gloom of the evening light. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


101 


CHAPTER XI. 

Dinner at the Casa Challoner that night was on the table 
at half-past seven. The husband and wife sat down alone. 
Her brow was as the thunders that rest on the brow of Soracte. 

At a quarter to nine loris entered. 

“ I was kept late at the Casa di Risparmio,” he explained. 
He endeavored to awake their interest in that excellent insti- 
tution, but vainly. 

Lady Joan ordered up for him the shreds of the fish and 
the legs of the woodcocks. Such discipline she considered to 
be good for him. Mr. Challoner grumbled over his claret that 
the sauce had been ruined by waiting ten minutes for nothing. 

It was a silent repast, only varied by scolding from the top 
of the table, as a long dull day of rain may be varied by mut- 
terings of thunder from on high. They had many such. 
Life, when it runs on three castors, seldom runs upon velvet. 

She was of opinion with Sganarelle, that “ cinq ou six 
coups de batons entre gens qui s’aiment ne font que ragaillarder 
I’affection.” 

But, like Sganarelle also, she always premised that the right 
to give the blows should be hers. 

“ You must come up to Fiordelisa,” said the Lady Joan 
to Etoie with much urgency, a few days later. 

Prince loris looked uneasy and ill pleased, but added, with 
courteous effect, “ Fiordelisa may be so happy as to interest you, 
perhaps, by its age and its story; its greatness has long 
departed.” 

“ What can Fiordelisa be ?” thought Etoile. 

The Lady Joan explained, unasked, as she drove over the 
Campagna. She was always explaining. Explanation is a 
blunder usually : whoever explains is, by self-implication, in 
error ; but she was a mistress of the art, and found it answer 
with most people. 

She lived in a state of perpetual apology. The meeting- 
house clothes were a standing apology for the cakes and ale. 

It half amused Etoile as she began to perceive it, and half 
9 * 


102 


FRIENDSHIP. 


disgusted her. To a woman who was utterly indiflPerent to what 
the world said of her at any time, this struggle in another to 
combine self-indulgence with self-justification seemed the 
drollest of anomalies. 

“ Why not be Messalina, if it please her ? or why not be 
St. Cecilia, if she liked it ?” thought Etoile. “ But why pass 
her life trimming up wrong as right, in sipping brandy and 
declaring it is cold tea ?” 

But that was the mistake of a careless and contemptuofis 
temper. Lady Joan knew better. She knew that it was much 
wiser to pass off your cognac as souchong, and that you may 
take as much brandy as ever you like, if only you can convince 
everybody else that it is tea. 

When Theodore Hook wanted to get drunk, not to scandalize 
the club he was in, he called for lemonade : the waiters knew 
what to bring him. 

Lady Joan called for cold tea so loudly that she might have 
been heard from the banks of Tiber to her own old hunting- 
grounds by Abana and Pharpar. Those who waited on her knew 
what to bring her. Meanwhile, that overgrown club. Society, 
was quite sure it was only tea. 

Society will believe anything rather than ever believe that 
Itself can be duped. 

If you have only assurance enough to rely implicitly on this, 
there is hardly anything you cannot induce it to accept. 

Her society, having once decided to believe that Lady Joan 
only drank cold tea, were ready to go to the scafibld in a body 
rather than admit that she even knew the color of brandy. 

Her society was limited, indeed ; but then it was the club 
she was in, — the only one that mattered to her, — all her dear 
passers-by that wanted teacups and triptychs, and all her small 
gentilities and freeborn republicans that asked her to dinners 
and dances. 

Besides, her brandy would not have tasted half so good if 
she had not had the fun of persuading everybody else it was 
tea. There is an indescribable delightfulness to a certain order 
of minds in smuggling. 

She now proceded to explain elaborately. Fiordelisa was 
loris’s old castle, but they lived there ; it helped him a little, 
lo was so poor ; lo was so weak ; they were so fond of him : 
poor lo ! without her eye over him and Mr. Challoner’s counsel 


FRIENDSHIP. 


103 


he would be mined to-morrow. Yes, of course it did aid him 
very much, their living there ; and they had done no end of 
good to the place. Such a wretched old barn as it had been 
when they had gone there first of all ! Nobody could imagine 
the trouble she took 1 But then when she went in for anything 
she always did do it thoroughly ; not like lo, — poor lo ! — who 
would never have a centime ofif the estate if she did not get it 
for him. How she slaved over those silkworms, for instance 1 
such beastly-smelling things as they were; and she scarcely 
stirred out of the house for three months, she had to watch 
them so ; but then she made three hundred pounds nearly by 
the raw silk in the year ; and only think what three hundred 
pounds meant to poor lo ! Thus she discoursed, whipping the 
ponies. She was so used to making the discourse that it ran 
off her tongue like her raw silk ofi* the reels of the winder. 
More or less varied, according to her auditors, it did duty to a 
thousand listeners in the twelvemonth’s time, and induced Mrs. 
Grundy to submit to Fiordelisa, and even sometimes to visit 
there. 

“ The place was quite poverty-stricken when we came,” she 
said, with a cut of the whip to the pony Pippo. “ When we 
knew him first he was the brink of ruin ; we pulled him 
straight. Through extravagance? — oh, no; weakness. lo’s 
as weak as water, — give his head away if he’d got nothing 
else to give. Just like St. Martin and his cloak. He is like 
a child about business, too ; a baby would wind him round its 
finger : he can’t say no. If it wasn’t for me, he’d maintain 
all the ague-shaking souls of the Agro Bomano ; I’m sure he 
would.” 

“ Is he duly grateful to you?” Etoile, lying back in the 
carriage, began to pity the absent man vaguely. 

Lady Joan shot a glance at her. 

“ Oh, I don’t know,” she muttered, a little sullenly. “ He 
knows he couldn’t keep straight without me, if you mean 
that. We’ve spent a great deal on the place, too ; but then 
we’ve got very fond of it. I’ve made three new vignas this 
year ; got my vines out from Portugal. I grubbed up an old 
garden and planted it with Xeres. I shall make sherry in 
three summers more.” 

“ And if your friend ever marry ?” said Etoile, with the 
indifierence she felt, only hazarding a natural conjecture. 


104 


FRIENDSHIP. 


The Lady Joan’s eyes flashed as steel does in the rays of 
the sun. 

“ Marry I” She drew her breath and set her teeth ; but 
in another moment she smiled. 

“ Ah, yes, I do so wish he would, if he married properly. 
But, you see, poor lo, — well, he’s very silly about me; thinks 
there’s nobody like me, and all that. But it’s all nonsense. 
I’m always telling him not to be a goose.” 

“ He lives in hopes of Mr. Challoner’s euthanasia ? And 
yet he lets Mr. Challoner plant his vines ?” 

“Bother you! How much has Voightel told you?” 
thought the Lady Joan, with wrath in her soul ; but she 
laughed and grinned pleasantly. She had a trick of grinning, 
but then she had very handsome teeth to show. 

“ Mr. Challoner die ! My dear, he’ll live forever ! I believe 
he was cut out of a tree of lignum-vitae. I’m sure he looks as 
if he had been. By the by, he wanted to come to-day, but some 
telegrams came in and kept him, — heaven be praised for all 
its mercies 1 We get rid of him in the summer, you know. 
He goes to the German baths somewhere or other with little 
Efiie, and Efiie’s Swiss governess. Have you seen that Swiss 
girl ? Horrid little upstart ; I believe she came out of a cafe- 
chantant at Vevay. Mr. Challoner chose her. Of course 
Effie’s taught to disobey me, and lie, and be rude in all kinds 
of ways that she can. Oh, my dear, you don’t know half the 
troubles I have to put up with.” 

“ And people think Mr. Challoner such an excellent man I 
I suppose you did also once ?” 

“Ill always thought him the most odious cad in the whole 
universe. I’ve never changed about responded his wife, 
with one of those sudden bursts of temper and truthfulness 
which occasionally upset all her best plans and tallest card 
house of conventionalities ; then, conscious of a slip of the 
tongue, she colored, and was glad that Pippo took to pulling. 

“ lo’s very unhappy about you,” she said, suddenly. “ He 
declares you don’t like him. Is it true ?” 

“ Not at all : he has beautiful manners. I think him an 
admirable laquais de place.^' 

Lady Joan screamed with laughter, well pleased. 

“ Won’t I tell him that 1 Poor lo I I suppose you wonder 
to see him about our house so much ; but, you see, he’s very 


FRIENDSHIP. 105 

useful to us, and we’re useful to him, and he’s all alone at 
home, and so ” 

“ I do not wonder at all.” 

Lady Joan was silent. She was revolving in her mind 
whether it was worth while to try and impose the fiction of 
friendship on a woman who lived in Paris and who knew 
Voightel. There were persons before whom Lady Joan threw 
off her meeting-house clothes and danced her Carmagnole in 
all the frank and boisterous abandonment natural to her. She 
wondered whether it would be safe to do it here. Etoile made 
her uneasy : she could not tell what manner of woman this 
great artist was. 

A grave, studious, contemptuous contemplation that seemed 
to gaze at her from the eyes of her new acquaintance worried 
her, and made her feel unsafe and uncertain. Like all cow- 
ards, she was occasionally nervous. Etoile made her so. She 
desired to conciliate her, but she did not know how to do it. 
She desired to blind her, but she had a restless feeling that it 
would not be safe to do so. 

All the weapons with which she was accustomed to fence 
with most people, and all the ruffs and farthingales with which 
she arrayed herself to please the meeting-house and Mrs. 
Grundy, seemed all of a sudden blunt and useless, coarse and 
foolish. She could not take them up and put them on with 
the fortunate mixture of swagger and propriety common to 
her. 

“ I wish she had never come near me,” she thought, with a 
useless irritation, as she turned the ponies up the rough grassy 
road which led to Fiordelisa on this balmy sunny morning of 
earliest winter ; and she said, aloud, — 

“ I sent lo up after breakfast : he’ll have everything ready, 
unless, indeed, he’s given the luncheon to the dogs and the 
wine to a pack of beggars, — which would be very like him,” 
she added, with a laugh that was not easy or good-tempered, 
as she rattled the ponies up the sloping way between the red- 
dening maples and the leafless vines. 

loris came out of the wide-arched doorway to meet them 
as the ponies — his ponies — were pulled up before the entrance. 
He wore a black velvet dress ; he had a broad-leafed felt hat iu 
his hand ; he had a red ribbon round his throat, and a hound at 
his side. He looked like an old Velasquez picture as the sun 

E* 


106 


FRIENDSHIP. 


fell on his face and the depth of the shadow of the door was 
still behind him in the background. 

“ Take my furs, lo. Oh, how stupid you are ! ’ cried the 
Lady Joan. “ Do you know what the Comtesse d’ Avesnes says 
of you ? She says — (now, mind that basket !) — she says she 
thinks you are an admirable laquais de place /” 

loris reddened under his delicate dark skin, but bowed low. 

“ I am glad that the Comtesse d’ Avesnes can think that I 
have even so much small merit as that in me,” he answered, 
lifting eyes of soft reproach. His eyes obeyed his will and 
uttered what he wanted for him more eloquently than most 
men’s tongues will do. 

“ M. le Prince,” said Etoile, with a smile, as she gave him 
her hand, “ when I see you mounted higher in the social scale, 
I will accredit you with it. At present, mind that basket !” 

loris gave an impatient gesture, and Lady Joan laughed, 
not altogether well pleased at the imitation of her tones and 
her order. 

“ How he will hate her !” thought the Lady Joan, consoling 
herself with the reflection as they strolled through the house 
on to the terrace, with the dusky wooded hills and the heights 
of Rocca di Papa behind them, and before them, beyond the 
now leafless vineyards and the gardens golden with orange fruit 
and bright with Bengal roses, the width of the green Cam- 
pagna, with the sun shining on the far yellow streak that was 
Tiber, and the purple cloud which they knew was Rome, dusky 
with her many roofs and ruins. 

But for once Lady Joan was mistaken : loris was rather 
inclined to hate himself. 

“ Do I indeed look such a fool to her?” he thought, con- 
stantly, as they went through the house, showing her the 
various old pictures, and marbles, and tapestries, and Etruscan 
treasures found in the soil without. The old castle had lost 
much of its whilom magnificence, but it was very ancient, 
and had a noble and honorable melancholy in it which ill 
accorded with the Lady Joan’s cigar-boxes and ulsters, crewel 
work and caricatures, coats of new paint and panes of crude 
glass ; it looked profaned and disturbed, and had that air of 
resentment at its own profanation which ancient places do 
seem to wear under sacrilege, as though they were sentient 
things. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


107 


They lunched in the dining hall, where Lady Joan arranged 
all her china, pottery, porcelain, and the rest on shelves, to 
be handy for the eye and purse of that much-suflfering and 
largely -spending class of society, “ the people passing through 
Rome.” 

loris sat at the bottom of his table, but Mr. Challoner’s wife 
sat at the top, and gave all the orders of the day, and chattered 
throughout the meal of her wines and her peasants, her fowls 
and her fruits. There was a portrait of the dead mother of 
loris on one of the walls. Etoile wondered that he left it 
there. 

“ Is Fiordelisa really yours ?” she said suddenly to him 
when the Lady Joan had for a moment left them, her voice 
alone being heard from afar off in violent altercation with the 
henwife, who had let the last score of fowls be sold too cheap 
in the market. 

“ Fiordelisa !” he echoed, in surprise. “ Yes, certainly ; it 
has been in my family twelve centuries.” 

“ Mr. Challoner has a lease of it, I suppose?” 

“ Oh, no ; I would never let it.” 

“ You lend it to them, then ?” 

“ Lady Joan does me the honor to like to use it, — ^yes.” 

“ And do your people like to be scolded ?” 

“ Oh, that is nothing ; they do not mind.” 

“ But what right has she to scold them ? Because she 
scolds you : is that it ?” 

“ Because she scolds everybody and everything. Some 
women do,” said loris, with a shrug of his shoulders. 

Etoile smiled, and the smile made him restless. It was only 
amusement, but he thought it contempt. 

From the other side of the tall cypress hedge the voice of 
Lady Joan came in strong anger, high above the cackle of 
poultry and the shrill outcries of the peasants. In another 
moment she appeared in sight, a mangled mass of feathers 
dangling from one hand and a hunting-whip in the other. 

“Why will you let that beastly dog loose?” she said to 
loris. “ He has killed two of my best Brahmas. I bought 
them only last week, — forty francs a pair, and such layers 1 
I have told them if I catch him loose again I’ll hang him.” 

loris looked up with a flush on his face. “ You have never 
beaten Imperator again?'' 


108 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Haven’t I ? — within an inch of his life. He won’t forget 
killing the Brahmas. What did you let him loose for? I 
told you he never was to be loose, — great clumsy brute, break- 
ing the plants to pieces.” 

“ Cara Joanna ! It is impossible to keep a dog always 
chained.” 

“ Don’t keep him at all, then. I shall hang him if I catch 
him loose, that’s all. I have just told Pietro so, and he’s 
sobbing like a baby, and Mariannina screaming! — I should 
think you heard them here. Break Imperator’s heart? Rub- 
bish 1 Break his bones, if you like. I shall if he kills my 
poultry. You are such an idiot, lo, about that dog.” 

And she went back as she came. 

“ Will you forgive my leaving you a second ? I must look 
at the dog,” said loris, hurriedly, with the color still in his 
cheeks. 

“ I will come and see him too,” Etoile answered him. 
“ But why do you let him be beaten ? She can have no right 
to do that.” 

loris gave one of those gestures with which an Italian says, 
better than by all words, that what the gods will he must 
suffer, and their fiat is stronger than he. 

They found the hound in his kennel, and he crept out tim- 
idly, and shivering still, with pain as with fear, and fawned 
upon his master. loris caressed him, kissed him, called him 
endearing words, and did his best to comfort him. 

“ But why not have sooner protected him ?” thought Etoile, 
watching the mutual affection between the man and the ani- 
mal, and making friends with the hound herself, whilst loris 
called to his land-steward, — 

“ Tista, will you see to this ? Take care that when the 
Signora is here Imperator is kept always in kennel. Of course 
he is to be loose at all other times ; and if he kill or break 
anything, do you replace it, and keep it out of the accounts. 
I will pay you for it apart. Only take care that the Signora 
does not see him free, and that she never hears it if he hunts 
anything. You understand ?” 

“ I understand his Excellency. But in the summer?” 

“ There are months before that,” said loris, impatiently ; 
and, turning to Etoile, he excused himself for giving orders 
before her, and asked her to come round with him to see from 


FRIENDSHIP. 109 

another point of view where E,occa di Papa hung above in the 
fir-woods. 

“ Will you not let Imperator loose to come with us ?” she 
asked. 

“ I could not do that. She would not like it.” 

“ Is the dog hers, then ?” 

“ No, mine.” 

“ And you cannot do as you like with your own ?” 

He was silent. 

“ I heard all your orders to your bailiff,” she pursued. 
“Forgive me; but, instead of all that complicated arrange- 
ment with him about the dog, would it not be straighter and 
simpler just to say to Lady Joan that you do not allow him 
to be beaten, and that you always wish him to be free? If 
she be only a guest, how can you object?” 

loris sighed impatiently. 

“ Oh, that would not do with her. You scarcely compre- 
hend. She is so used to have her own way ; I could not dis- 
please her.” 

“ Poor Imperator ! And yet you seem fond of him.” 

“ Imperator only bears what I do.” 

He muttered the words low, as if they escaped from him 
against his will, as they reached the little path that wound up 
into the hills among the myrtle-bushes, and the tufts of tra- 
marina, and the wild growth of oleander which made tike 
mountain-side a blaze of rose-color in the days of June. 

“What is the secret of Fiordelisa?” Etoile wondered, as 
the ladies of Craig Moira had wondered before her. 

Fiordelisa was the Lady Joan’s fee-simple of loris. ilad 
he never let her within the walls of Fiordelisa, Liberty would 
not have outspread its wings and fled away from him. 

Fiordelisa, crowning its hillside amidst cypress woods and 
olive groves warm in the light of the western sun, and ficing 
the opal and amethyst lines of the mountains — Fiordelisa was 
the last bead of a long chaplet of noble strongholds once be- 
longing to the great princes of loris. 

When Lady Joan had been seven months in Rome, still 
languid from the heats of the East, the summer in the city 
alarmed her. She averred that she would die of malaria, and 
that her lord was such a churl he would never give her the 
means to get a breath of fresher air. 

10 


no 


FRIENDSHIP. 


The churl had but recently joined her, and could be repre- 
sented in any colors she chose ; and she, and the churl also, 
had breakfasted and lunched several times at that sunny 
solitary palace standing empty on the fair hillside, and the 
lust of desire for it had entered into her soul. Therefore 
she wept, she went into hysterics, she had even a week’s 
fever. 

loris laid the keys of Fiordelisa at her feet. What less 
could he do ? 

She affected reluctance, suggested danger from the wrath 
of the churl, but in the end relented and accepted. 

It was but a dreary old place, said its master, and he sent 
up from the city all the modern necessities of daily life, had 
its mighty old chambers swept out, the wild garden put a 
little in order, sent his horses up there, and welcomed the 
wife of Mr. Challoner to a villeggiatura. 

Figuratively, he had put handcuffs on his own wrists. 

“What a madman!” thought Mr. Challoner, when he 
heard of the arrangement ; but aloud he said merely, “ You 
are very good. Will it not bore you ? No ? I fear, indeed, 
my wife is not strong enough for travel. It is most unfortu- 
nate.” 

For Mr. Challoner of the unchanging countenance always 
bore himself to loris, as he had done to his wife’s friends in 
the East, with the grave face and the ceremonious manner 
with which one Roman augur of old addressed another augur 
in public. 

Mr. Challoner was like Mrs. Siddons : he never left off the 
stage face and the stage tone, even if he were only buying a 
yard of huckaback and inquiring if it would wash. 

“ Go to the castle,” he said to his wife ; “ go to the castle, 
since you wish it ; but take some good girl or other with you. 
Mind that.” 

And, having thus made due provision for the safety of ap- 
pearances, he departed for the baths in Germany, leaving his 
wife on the hillside, — to recover her health. 

People all wondered at the husband’s complacency. They 
would not have wondered if they had been able to see into 
his recollections. Everything is comparative. Fiordelisa, as 
compared with Orontes and Euphrates, Abana and Pharpar, 
seemed to Mr. Challoner propriety itself. He himself won- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Ill 


dered very mucli at loris. But this is a bad compliment that 
husbands will always pay their wives. 

Lady Joan’s eyes sparkled as she crossed the threshold. 
Here was an occupation of territory that meant (to her far- 
seeing eyes at least) an annexation for life. Like Prussia and 
Russia, she only wanted to get her foot once across the fron- 
tier, and the soil was hers forever and aye. Once installed in 
Fiordelisa, who should live, bold enough, or shrewd enough, 
ever to turn her out of it ? 

There are some women so happily constituted that they 
consider that for the gifts of themselves all the treasures of 
earth would be scarcely recompense enough. 

Lady Joan was one of these. 

When he surrendered Fiordelisa he had surrendered his 
future into her hands. 

He had not known it. But she had. 

To dislodge a tenant unwilling to go is at all times difficult ; 
the tiles must be taken off ere even law can aid. But a 
woman like the Lady Joan would sit still, bareheaded and 
fast-rooted, under the open skies till the tiles were put on 
again, and defy heaven and earth and all their elements to 
move her. 

Possession is nine points of the law ; and with nine points 
it would have been odd indeed if Lady Joan should not have 
managed, by hook or by crook, to obtain the tenth. 

loris, with that touch of simplicity that a man’s finest 
astuteness is always mingled with, imagined that he only lent 
Fiordelisa for a summer or two. Lady Joan laughed to her- 
self to think how easily she had drawn away this trump card 
from him. 

“ Get me out !” she thought to herself. “ Not when I’m 
once let in.” 

A great statesman being once asked what was the surest 
method of success, replied, “ Immovability.” 

Lady Joan understood the wisdom of the saying. When 
she installed herself at Fiordelisa gayly as one who only 
bivouacs for a midsummer picnic, she hung her cashmere 
upon the first peg she saw in the hall. 

“ There is my fee-simple for life,” she thought. 

What can any man do against a woman who, long ere a 
hint be given her, has resolved that she never will take one ? 


112 


FRIENDSHIP. 


loris, who thought of his country as Musset did, — “ Que 
les soleils de Juin font V amour passa^erf — in the midsummer 
months looked forward to a romance bright and brief as the 
life of the fireflies among the corn, — a midsummer madness 
befitting the months when the oleander burns on the world 
like fire, and the nightingales sing under flowering myrtles. But 
Lady Joan knew better. 

The castle was ancient, honorable, majestic, like an old gray- 
beard who has lived long enough to see his children and 
friends all die before him. These old places, grand with art 
and architecture of a statelier and freer time than ours, touch 
strangely poets, artists, thinkers, — asses, as the Lady Joan 
would have said. 

Its antiquity could not “ scare” her, nor its sanctity silence 

her. 

She entered on its possession with the zeal of an encamping 
gypsy and the ruthlessness of an army of occupation. 

She drew on a big pair of untanned boots, strode over the 
lands, marked the waste there was, and said to herself that 
she would soon alter all that. Before the summer was gone 
she had installed herself mistress there; before the winter 
had come she had taught its master that she meant to be 
mistress and master both. When next the springtime came 
round she did not consult his pleasure, or feel any necessity 
for hysterics: she took for granted that she should go to 
Fiordelisa. 

She did go. This time Mr. ChaJloner accompanied her, 
and took with him some packets of English seeds and the 
model of a kitchen-boiler. 

The family installed itself at Fiordelisa audaciously as 
Tchiganes, sagaciously as Prussians. They cut walks, levelled 
trees, made the garden a fair imitation of the gravelled paral- 
lelograms of South Kensington, closed in the loggia with doors 
of colored glass as nearly like a railway station as they could 
manage to make them, asked out English and Americans to 
dinner and breakfast, and began to interest themselves in 
breeding pigs and chickens. 

“ We’ve done so much for the old place !” said the Lady 
Joan, working a chair-cover, while her husband brought up 
Tegetmeier on Poultry. 

^^VaudacCj Vaudace^ toujours de Vaudace^' was her motto ; 


FRIENDSHIP. 


113 


and it is wonderful how very far one may manage to go by a 
diligent adherence to it in the world, as in war. 

Five years and more had now passed by since that first 
midsummer day when she had gone up as an occupant to 
Fiordelisa, and had turned out all the old pottery and tapes- 
tries and artistic lumber it was full of, with the zeal and zest 
of a victorious trooper ransacking a wine-cellar ; and by this 
time the Lady Joan honestly considered herself the legitimate 
occupant of it, and would have looked on the establishment 
of any more lawful mistress there, as an invasion of her 
rights as grave as an Irish peasant regards a writ of evictment 
to be. 

She had stuck her staff in the ground at Fiordelisa, and 
never henceforth discoursed of it but as hers. When obliged 
to acknowledge the fact of its master’s presence and possession 
she would allude to “ poor lo” airily, as though if could not 
have afforded a dinner unless they had been there to give him 
one. 

She set the china that she meant to sell on the shelves, 
spread the carpets he paid for on the floors, and then talked 
of how much she had done for him ; invited people under 
his roof, and got credit for “ such hospitality gave away his 
fruits, and eggs, and flowers, and wines, and was cited as “ so 
generous and, further, amused herself throughout the spring 
with having out there to dine and to sleep every good-looking 
man who lingered in Rome and was glad to come and smoke 
under the stars in the old gray cortile. 

Fiction is a greyhound and Truth is a snail. She set Fic- 
tion flying over the course. She had, indeed, once ordered 
out from England at her own expense two peach-trees and a 
Berkshire pig. It was all she ever had done ; but, as every- 
body ate a peach and tasted the ham and heard what she had 
done, everybody took all the rest for granted. 

“ I do so love my bees, and my beasts, and my pigs, and 
my poultry !” she herself would echo gushingly to the goody- 
goodies, to whom she was careful to appear as a kind of Har- 
riet Martineau with a model farm of four (thousand) acres that 
was always, sleeping or waking, upon her mind. 

“ I am sure, most laudable,” said the goody-goodies, quite 
impressed with the spectacle of a person born a Perth-I)ouglas 
absorbing herself in bees, and beiists, and pigs, and poultry. 

10 * 


114 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Higher society, less reverent and more dihonnaire^ laughed 
till it cried. But, whether leaving admiration or ridicule 
behind her, to Fiordelisa she went when the April narcissus 
was in bloom. She conceived a kind of passion for the place, 
it was so useful to her. 

That dual character in her, which Voightel had chuckled 
over, had full luxury of expansion both ways at Fiordelisa ; 
all the various and opposing passions of her nature found vent 
therein at Fiordelisa : she could be Cleopatra at sunset and a 
huckster at sunrise. 

With a guitar on her knee, and amorous eyes shining under 
the passion-flowers in the court by moonlight, one side of her 
temperament had its sport and play ; with her skirts tucked 
about her knees, a memorandum-book in her hand, and a fierce 
vigilance in every one of her searching glances, striding through 
granaries, wine-cellars, and cattle-stalls, pursuing missing cen- 
times through columns of figures, and making the bailiflP 
wretched for a lost franc, the other side of her had its fullest 
and sweetest sway also. 

To be sure, she never reflected that one view of her might 
spoil the other to the person by whose permission she was 
there ; she never reflected that the prosaic God of Business 
might take Love by the shoulders and turn him out of doors. 

If Antony had seen Cleopatra squabbling for a coin over a 
basket of fish or a basket of dates, he might probably have 
recovered his senses and avoided Actium. 

But she did not think of this. 

She had become so used to loris, and so certain of her do- 
minion over him, that she had altogether ceased to preserve 
for him those graces of appearance which the woman who is 
truly wise never neglects before the man whose passion she 
desires to keep alive. 

Familiarity breeds contempt in the lover, as in the servant. 

Lady Joan’s vanity made her too forgetful of one supreme 
truth, — that the longest absence is less perilous to love than 
the terrible trials of incessant proximity. 

She forgot that love likes to preserve its illusions, and that 
it will bear better all the sharpest deprivations in the world 
than it will the cruel tests of an unlovely and unveiled inter- 
course. 

She had committed the greatest error of all : she had let 


FRIENDSHIP, 


115 


*him be disenchanted by familiarity. Passion will pardon rage, 
will survive absence, will forgive infidelity, will even thrive on 
outrage, and will often condone a crime ; but when it dies of 
familiarity it is dead for ever and aye. 

The Lady Joan in her Oriental jewelry and her Asiatic 
dresses was a woman for Velasquez to paint, and most men to 
admire, and some to sigh for with ardor and desire. But the 
Lady Joan with thick untanned leather boots on, hair pulled 
tight from her face, and a gray skirt tucked up about her legs, 
or astride upon a donkey in a waterproof in muddy weather, 
counting the artichokes and tomatoes before they went to 
market. Lady Joan was not a woman to adore or to portray ; 
and loris, artist as Nature had made him, and lover as he was 
expected to be, opening his window in the lovely rosy dawn 
and looking down on her thus occupied, would sigh and won- 
der what ever he had seen, — why ever he had sacrificed him- 
self ; and so, tired, and nerveless, and discontented, and afraid 
to show his discontent, he would go down his staircase and 
into the radiant balmy morning that itself outshone all the 
dreams of all the poets, and would hear her delighted voice 
ring out, “ Seven robins and a nightingale shot before break- 
fast, lo ! What do you think of that ?” and dared not say what 
he thought of it, but had to smile and praise her skill, and 
look at the little pretty ruffled blood-stained heap of feathers, 
and submit to have the hand that was black with the car- 
tridges passed through his arm to draw him into the loggia, 
wdiere the morning meal was spread, and had to take his coffee 
and fruit seasoned with stories of how Nannia had been caught 
sneaking off with a stolen cabbage, and how Pepe had been 
detected filling his pockets with green peas as he had weighed 
thein, and all the while to himself watched drearily the silver 
threads that the light found out in his mistress’s hair, and 
wondered why she dressed so shabbily because she was in the 
country, and thought how large her hand looked as it plunged 
among the strawberries, and felt vaguely that this was not the 
companion fitting to that old sunlit, air-swept, flower-scented 
loggia, with the roses round its columns, and beyond its arches 
the wide blue hills. 

But she did not dream of this : she dug and planted, and 
bought and sold, and planned and bargained ; she kept a sharp 
eye on the weights and measures, she ran up model sties and 


116 


FRIENDSHIP. 


breeding-pens ; she got up at five to count the potatoes and 
melons, the cherries and cabbages, that went to the market ; 
she rode his horses, and ordered his bailifis, and strode about 
in gray linen and big boots, and did on the whole most ad- 
mirably, — for herself. 

No doubt if he had overheard her explaining to her English 
and Americans how all this was done only out of charity, to 
help “ poor lo,” it would all have speedily come to an end. 
But then he never did hear — except just what was meant for 
his ear. 

He had an uncomfortable feeling that it was all disagree- 
able, and tedious, and noisy ; and he prized the afibction of 
his peasants and farmers, and their irritation under the new 
reign oppressed and saddened him. In his remembrance there 
might have been a great deal of waste, but there was a great 
deal of feudal affection. In other years at his annual visits 
there had been only smiles, laughter, music, rejoicing ; now 
there were often rebellion, discontent, imprecations, and sullen 
silence. 

Of course, however, she, like all other great improvers, was 
not to be daunted by such a trivial thing as poor folks’ devo- 
tion and mere clinging to old landmarks. She brought her 
new brooms and swept away with them vigorously ; and if the 
brooms caught at such old trumpery tapestries as custom, tra- 
dition, and loyalty, and pulled them down in fragments, so 
much the better, she thought: she cared for no old rubbish, — 
that wouldn’t sell again. 

He sighed, and let her sweep on. 

Meanwhile Mr. Challoner was always careful to set the seal 
of his presence, with his flower-seeds and his kitchen-boilers, 
on the private life of Fiordelisa, and at the beginning of each 
summer was always to be duly met with by any passing visitors 
gravely contemplating his wife’s poultry-pens or solemnly wa- 
tering his own stove-plants, and in his pursuit of those inno- 
cent occupations would always find some occasion to say, in an 
abstracted manner, leaning over a model pig-sty, “Yes, yes, 
we have done a good deal for the place ; my wife is never so 
happy as when she is doing good ; yes, we brought over those 
Berkshires. Nothing like English breed ; nothing.” 

Society thought Mr. Challoner very amiable and strangely 
blind. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


117 


Mr. Challoner suffered neither from amiability nor blindness. 
He quarrelled incessantly with his wife about everythsng else, 
little and large ; but he never quarrelled about loris. 

, What could a blade of steel in a wintry dawn have given 
Mr. Challoner of vengeance comparable to that which he 
smiled grimly over as he saw another man, daily and hourly, 
bullied, ridiculed, stormed at, ordered about, driven to account 
for every absent hour, and deprived of every vestige of a will 
of his own ? 

Mr. Challoner was like the Dauphin who kept the luxury 
of a whipping-boy. 

Vengeance ! — 

‘‘N’allons pas chercher K faire une querclle 
Pour un affront qui n’est que pure bagatelle !” 

There was no one living on earth to whom Mr. Challoner 
owed so much comfort as he did to loris. And, indeed, he 
would say, with quite a cordial ring in his voice, “ loris ? 
Oh, a very good fellow, — the best friend we have I” 

A quiet, excellent woman, who was his father’s widow and 
no relation to him, but whom he called his “ mother,” because 
it is always so respectable to have a mother, would occasion- 
ally, on visiting at the Casa Challoner, observe with disquie- 
tude the Lady Joan disporting herself in a break full of masks 
on Giovedi Grasso, or going out shooting, with her gun, and 
her hessians, and her Roman nobles ; and on such occasions 
old Mrs. Challoner would murmur to the master of the estab- 
lishment, “ Puir laddie ! it’s a great name and a braw house 
to have married into, and that there’s no denying, but I’m 
thinking, my poor Robert, that you have paid a niuckle price 
for the gentility.” 

“Joan has high spirits; it is merely high spirits,” Mr. 
Challoner would return, with an austerity that closed the 
discussion. 

For Mr. Challoner never told anybody what price he had 
paid, whether muckle or mickle. He had never given any 
living soul the right to say that he was other than a most 
contented husband. 

He had made his bargain with his eyes open, and the bar- 
gain had been that he was to keep his eyes shut. And he 
fulfilled it loyally. 


118 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Now and then he winced ; now and then he smiled. But 
It was only to himself. Lady Joan, who quarrelled with him 
to his face, and railed at him behind his back, could not resist 
a sort of admiration for his impassibility. “ The creature 
might be cut out of wood !” she said, often. Now, a wooden 
husband is the most convenient of all lay figures. 

This winter afternoon the real master of Fiordelisa, with 
his guest, strolled upward by the hill-paths bordered with 
aloe and cactus, and shaded with cereus and cistus, towards 
the yet higher lands of Fiordelisa, where the stone pines 
reigned alone with the tall lilac heather at their feet. 

He strove to understand, to interest, and to amuse Etoile, 
and he succeeded. He had at command graceful thoughts 
and picturesque diction ; he loved art, and had studied it pro- 
foundly. He had been irritated because this stranger, herself 
eminent in the world’s sight, seemed to think him a slave 
without power or purpose, and the unlikeness of her to any 
other woman that he had ever known stung him to interest 
and moved him to exertion. 

loris, like many men before him, had sunk into an existence 
in which his mind had no share. 

It was as nearly brainless as a naturally intelligent man’s 
life can ever be. 

To obey all his ruler’s desires ; to attend to the thousand 
and one trivialities that she daily imposed ; to see that what 
she ordered was done, and what she wanted found ; to follow 
her hither and thither ; to avert the tempest of her temper 
by prevision of her wishes, and to be careful that his servants, 
his horses, his house, his patience, his presence, his endurance, 
his exertions were all ready to the moment that she might 
call on them, — all this made his day one incessant and joyless 
routine of obedience. He woke in the morning with the 
dreary round before him, and he lay down at night seeing 
nothing better for the morrow, or for fifty hundred other 
morrows, if he lived long enough to have them dawn on 
him. Such a life killed his intelligence. The pure impersonal 
eff“orts of the mind may be heightened by a great joy and 
may be deepened by a great sorrow ; but a life of perpetual 
triviality yet of perpetual conflict — a life, in a word, which 
has been condensed into the one common comprehensive word 
of worry — does so irritate and yet benumb tho faculties that 


FRIENDSHIP, 119 

all intellectual effort dies out under it. It had been so with 
him. 

Lady Joan was no fool ; but she was one of those women 
who lower all they touch more than many fools. 

No delicate thought could live under one of her loud 
laughs ; no impersonal discussion could survive her boisterous 
personalities. Art itself looked ridiculous beside her preten- 
tious patronage of it and mercenary traffic in it. And the 
obliquity of her mental vision seemed to communicate itself 
to those about her till in her presence a praying angel of Mino 
da Fiesole’s soilless marble looked no better than a squat 
bonze from a Chinese temple. As there are women who 
exalt all that comes in contact with them, so did she lower 
all things. 

It was not her fault. Nature had made her so. 

But the effect on the mind of loris had been that of smoke 
on painting : it had dulled all the color and obscured all the 
lines. 

A certain lassitude crossed by a certain irritation had grown 
on him ; and the scholarship of his early youth, and the pro- 
ficiency of art which had distinguished him at one time, had 
died down into silence and obscurity. 

They were not needed for the wrangles of the house he fre- 
quented, and the scenes of barter that he was called upon to 
assist at in antiquity shops. 

With Etoile they awoke. For the man who is a scholar 
by culture will never altogether lose delight in it, and the 
temper that is born with the poetic element in it will never 
absolutely fail to answer to the right touch. It becomes like 
a harp whose silver strings are covered with dust, entangled^ 
jarred, and mute, but are still silver, and still keep song iii- 
them when they are struck aright. 

Not such a song, indeed, as when the chords first were 
strung, for tifne and wrong usage have done much to mar 
them ; but still a song, — a song sadder than tears some- 
times. 

The hill-paths were steep and the way long, but it seemed 
to have been short to them both, when at last they reached 
the pine wood, where Bocci di Papa was visible. High above 
hung the little gray tower on the rock where Juno once stood 
to watch how the battle went ; at least, we believe so, if we 


120 


FRIENDSHIP. 


liearken to Virgil ; and if we will not believe Virgil what right 
have we in Rome at all ? 

The sun was bright on the Volscian hills, and the snow on 
the line of the Leonessa and on the heights of the Sabine 
mountains glowed like an opal in the light. The low lands 
looked dusky and bronze-hued from clouds that hung above 
them, and a purple cloud shrouded the wild dark mountain of 
Soracte and floated midway between earth and heaven ; far, 
far away was a glancing line that showed where the sea was 
beating on the sad sands by Ostia ; and aloft, white and stern 
as an Alp, rose Monte Gennaro, who wraps his mantle of frost 
around him till the maize is tall in the plains and the girls are 
singing among the poppies. And in the centre of it all was 
Rome, with the cross of St. Peter’s clear against the light, 
and all the vast cloud-world around it. 

There is no view on the earth like this from one of tl e 
heights of the mountains of Rome. 

Etoile looked and was silent. The great tears gathered in 
her eyes, but did not flill. 

He watched her. 

“ You feel things too much,” he said, softly. 

She had forgotten him ; and she looked up with the surprise 
of a sleeper awakened from a dream. 

“ Oh, no, I think not,” she answered him. “ I pity those 
to whom the world is not so beautiful as it is to me.” 

“ And yet there are tears in your eyes.” 

“ Are there ? I cannot tell you — you, who have always 
lived here, cannot know, I think — all that one feels in looking 
so on Rome. One seems to see as God sees : all the hosts of 
the dead arise.” 

He was silent. The words moved him. He bowed his 
head and stood in silence, like one who will not break in upon 
a woman at prayer. 

At that moment his name echoed shrilly on the clear air. 
He started and listened. 

“ Forgive me,” he said, quickly. “ She is calling us. In 
a little while it will be dark.” 

“Where on earth have you been?” said the Lady Joan, 
with her face black as a lowering thundercloud as it loomed 
upon them through the lines of the tall polished laurel-trees. 
“ Where on earth have you been, lo ? The idea of climbing 


FRIENDSHIP. 


121 


up here ! and without me 1 I asked for you everywhere. The 
coffee is cold, and we shall have it pitch-dark to drive home ; 
and there is that young idiot’s opera to-night. What could 
you be doing up here all this time ?” 

“We have consoled Imperator ; and we have trodden in the 
steps of Juno,” Etoile made answer for him ; and she looked 
Lady Joan straight in the eyes as she spoke. 

There was something in the look of contempt and of chal- 
lenge : she herself was unconscious of it, but the other was 
alive to it. 

“ If she dare to cross me here !” thought Lady Joan ; and 
her brow darkened in storm and her eyes glittered till they 
were green as an angry cat’s. She was sullen and silent as 
they descended to the house and drank the coffee which was 
awaiting them in the square stone court. 

Fiordelisa was the apple of her eye. 

It was not, perhaps, very dignified work, squabbling with 
peasantry, counting potatoes and beans, ousting old folks from 
little territorial rights, keeping a sharp eye on the olive-presses 
and the wine-tubs, and hunting up the Cochin China eggs out 
of the straw and thatch. 

But what would you ? 

John Vatices, Emperor here in Rome, gave his wife a costly 
crown of emeralds and diamonds that was bought with the 
proceeds of his poultry, and why should not the hens of Fior- 
delisa lay rings of sapphire and ear-rings of turquoises ? 

Lady Joan pulled on her thick driving-gloves with a jerk 
before the coffee was fairly drunk. loris and Etoile were 
talking gayly and laughing together. 

“ I am sorry to hurry you,” she said, coldly. “ But the 
moment the sun goes down the nights are so bitter. And lo 
has a fancy, you know, for us to hear the new opera. A boy 
who lived in a dirty little poking town of the Maremma has 
dreamt that he is Mozart and Rossini combined, and lo de- 
voutly believes in him. lo’s geese are all swans.” 

“ A more amiable optimism, at any rate, than the common 
one which swears there are no swans at all, — only a few ducks 
in a pond,” said Etoile, taking her coffee from him. 

She smiled at him as she spoke. Almost insensibly she 
felt drawn into defending him against these persistent mock- 
eries, which had so little wit or wisdom in them, 
r 11 


122 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Perhaps we are only ducks,” she added. “ But we are 
always grateful to anybody who will believe in our snowy 
plumage, and who will vow for us that our stagnant little 
pond of vanity is a lake in which the mountains of the world 
are mirrored. Who is this young composer come out of the 
Maremma?” 

“ A boy of great genius,” said loris ; “ very young, — only 
twenty-two. He has had no education, except a year in Bo- 
logna ; but he has, with many faults, many excellences. This 
is his first opera. It is on the theme of Persephone. Parts 
of it are very fine ; and I think the choral renderings- ” 

“It is hideous rubbish,” said Lady Joan, roughly. “Just 
singsong out of Verdi and Gounod, and the ‘infernal’ part 
of it all borrowed wholesale out of ‘ Lohengrin,’ — growl, 
growl, growl, — bang, bang, bang, — that’s all. Besides, it’s 
been done in Orpliee aux Enfers." 

“ That is not quite the same thing,” said loris, with an 
involuntary smile. 

“ The same story,” said Lady Joan, confidently, turning to 
Etoile. “ The opera’s stuff. But the boy happened to get 
hold of lo last year ; and lo thinks he knows counterpoint 
and all that; and so he’s flattered, and believes in the trash, 
and uses all his influence to get the opera put on the stage 
of the Apollo. I dare say, if the truth were known, the 
dresses and things have come out of his own pocket. If he’d 
only a crust he’d give it to the first creature that squealed out 
for it. Oh, you know you would, lo, if I didn’t keep you 
straight. Give me a cigar. No, there’s no time for more 
coffee. See they put those grapes in ; I want them for the 
Bishop of Melita. And they’re to kill that sheep for me 
to-morrow. Mind Tista don’t forget. And they’d better 
shoot a few hares and send me them with the mutton in the 
morning; there’s that big dinner we have to-morrow, and 
Marjory wants one to jug for her father. And mind you tell 
the man to get that fence done by Monday ; and if the black- 
smith don’t come and put the padlocks on those gates directly 
I won’t pay him one farthing, — not one farthing !” 

“ If I didn’t see to the things he never would,” she ex- 
plained, as she took the reins of the ponies. “ He’d let 
people dawdle on forever, and pay ’em just the same for doing 
nothing. They know I won’t stand that nonsense. I’ve had 


FRIENDSHIP. 123 

all the gates put up and padlocked : the whole land used to lie 
open.” 

“ The people here must be very fond of you,” said Etoile. 

Lady Joan did not feel the satire. 

“ Oh, I don’t know. They ought to be. I physic ’em when 
they’re ill. Such wry.ftices they pull ! Of course I’m very 
kind to ’em all ; but first of all one must make a thing pay, — 
in lo’s interests, you know.” 

“ And you are of opinion with Zoroaster that to reap the 
earth with profit is of more merit than to repeat — or win — ten 
thousand prayers ?” 

“ I am rather of Plutarch’s,” said loris, joining them, and 
stroking his ponies. 

“ Was Plutarch an ass, then?” asked the Lady Joan, with ‘ 
supreme scorn. 

“ You would have thought him so : he could never bring 
himself to sell in its old age the ox which in its youth had 
served him faithfully. Voila tout.” 

“ That is just the sort of sentimental stuff to please you. 
The ox would make very good beef,” retorted the Lady Joan. 

“ Mind ! my sables are over the wheel.” 

She cut the ponies sharply over their heads with the whip 
and started them off full gallop down the rugged slope, leaving 
their master to spring up behind as best as he might. The 
ponies were his own, — spirited little cobs from Friuli, with 
jingling silver bells, and swinging foxes’ tails hung at their 
ears, — but no sort of possession was he allowed to enjoy of 
them. 

“ I want Grille and Pippo to-day,” he would say of a morn- 
ing ; and his groom would answer, “ I am very sorry, Excel- 
lence, but the Signora has ordered them.” loris had to shrug 
his shoulders and see his ponies depart to the Casa Challoner. 
Why did he never rebel ? He began to ask it of himself, 
leaning with his arms on the front seat of the carriage, look- 
ing at the profile of Etoile before him in the twilight. 

“ I do so wish you would come to the theatre to-night. Po 
change your mind. There are only the Plinlimmons at din- 
ner, — bores, I know, but wo should cut it short with the 
Opera,” urged Lady Joan, as she stopped the ponies to set her 
guest down in the Quirinal Square, and pressed an invitation 
which she knew was quite safe, since she had chanced to hear 


124 


FRIENDSHIP. 


that Etoile would pass that evening with the Princess Yera, 
who had “two or three people,” — i.e., about two or three 
hundred. 

“ The idea of her going to Princess Yera’s !” she muttered, 
as she drove away. “ Preposterous !” 

“Why that?” said loris, lighting ,a cigar, as the ponies 
dashed down the street of Four Fountains. 

“ Good gracious, lo ! can you want to ask ? But Princess 
Yera will know any artistic trash that takes her fancy, — rude 
as she can be to every respectable person.” 

And she slashed Pippo across the ears again. She her- 
self was among the respectable persons whom the Princess 
Yera treated with a calm ignorance of their existence very 
exasperating. 

The ponies rattled up the steep stones to her house ; and 
her husband, who was just then going in at the door, stopped, 
aided loris to unload her furs, and hoped they had had a 
pleasant day at Fiordelisa. 

“ Are you disposed to let Lady Norwich have your tur- 
quoises?” asked Mr. Challoner, ten minutes later, following 
his wife into the privacy of her own room. 

“ Yes, she may have ’em. I only bought them to sell 
again.” 

“ T thought of saying two thousand francs?” 

“ Yes ; that won’t be bad. I gave eight hundred ; but then 
the woman was hard up at HomWrg, you remember, and glad 
to let ’em go cheap. I grudge ’em to that old cat. Mind, she 
thinks we brought ’em from Persia, and had ’em polished in 
Yienna.” 

“ Y'ou’ll never do better with them : I think it is a veiy 
good price.” 

“ Tolerable. And they don’t suit me. Blue’s for blondes. 
Besides, they’re nasty uncertain things : one never knows they 
won’t change color. What about the Urbino jar?” 

“ I got it. It is genuine. An incomparable bit. You 
always make horrible mistakes, but you did not blunder there. 
The fellow had no idea of the value of it. I bought it like a 
common bit of kitchen pottery.” 

“ Yes, I know : the man kept his sugar in it.” 

“ By the way, old O’Glennamaddy wants an antique altar- 
screen.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


125 


“ Very well. We haven’t one ; but Mimo shall draw one, 
and little Faello can carve it. It can be ready in twenty days. 
O’Glen is a goose : he’d take anything.” 

“Yes. But people are not all geese that will go to visit him. 
Remember that. You had best show him good things.” 

“ Don’t you preach. I know O’Glen as I do my alphabet. 
He used to give me burnt-almonds when I was a baby. I say, 
mind you go yourself about that little Pieta to that man in 
Trastevere. lo was going, but I wouldn’t let him ; he never 
beats the people down ; and he talks some rubbish about the 
man’s wife being ill with the ague, — as if that had anything 
to do with it ! That’s just like lo. He bought a little plate 
of Gubbio ware yesterday ; the woman that owned it asked 
him fifteen francs, and he went and gave her seventy, — sev- 
enty ! — just because the thing was worth it — so he said ; but 
I believe it was only because she was crying about her land- 
lord pressing for rent. That’s just like lo : cry a little, and 
his hand goes in his pocket in a second.” 

Mr. Challoner smiled grimly. 

His wife was very fond of airing her contempt for her 
friend’s weaknesses before him. Not that there was the 
slightest occasion to do so. Mr. Challoner had left all rem- 
nants of jealousy long buried in the delta of Orontes and 
Euphrates, of Abana and Pharpar. And, besides, there was 
such perfect confidence between his wife and himself that 
there was never any need for explanations. 

“ I have boundless trust in her,” he would say, austerely, 
with injured dignity, if some old friend, too officious, ven- 
tured to hint that Lady Joan was a little — a little — perhaps a 
little too original. And, like all people who have boundless 
trust, he would shut his eyes when bidden. 

This kind of business-conference was a closer tie between 
them than any the marriage-altar could forge, and at discus- 
sions of this sort they were always good friends, finding each 
other’s views and principles often identical. Indeed, so sound 
were his wife’s ideas about business that Mr. Challoner could 
use his pet phrase with perfect veracity when speaking of 
her. 

“ You’ll come to the Opera to-night?” asked the Lady Joan 
now. 

“ No — no.” 


11 * 


126 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Oh, you’d better. The Norwiches will be there, and 
that old cat Plinlimmon is coming with us. They’ll all talk 
if you don’t.” 

“Very well,” said Mr. Challoner: he was always resigned 
to self-sacrifice for the public good. “You told them at Fior- 
delisa that I should bring Lord Norwich up to shoot on 
Monday ?” 

“ Yes. Mind, though ; Norwich thinks we’ve bought the 
place. You’d better make a party and take up a cold lunch- 
eon. Echeance will go, and Plunkett, and Gualdro Males- 
trina, and perhaps some of the attaches would if you asked 
’em, though I hate all that Chancellerie lot, — stiff as pokers ! 
By the by, since we put up the trespass-boards all round, the 
game’s in much better order, lo protests, and says the people 
will knife him for it some day, because they’ve always netted 
the hares and birds as they wanted them ; but that’s all rub- 
bish, I think. Anyhow, they shan’t get a head of game if 
1 can help it. There’s such heaps of partridges ! I shall have 
’em trapped for market when we’ve had the pick of the shoot- 
ing. I wish you’d write to England about those pigs ; and 
tell ’em to send out some pink kidney potatoes for planting : 
the Early Emilys are the best. lo settled that bill for the 
last, and never struck the wharf-duties off it, though I told 
him the shipper ought to pay them ; but he’s always so care- 
less about money. That’s the door-bell, isn’t it? — that horrid 
Plinlimmon woman : she’s got-up like a parrot, green and red 
and yellow and blue, I dare say. What a nuisance it is to 
have to do the polite ! Go in and say all sorts of things to 
her while I dress.” 

Mr. Challoner went in obedient and welcomed the Plin- 
limmons, who were very rich people, who had made a vast 
fortune by a new kind of candle, warranted never to melt or 
to splutter, and fulfilling its warranty nobly. He apologized 
for his wife’s tardy appearance, and quite affected the Plin- 
limmons, who were simple, sentimental folks, oppressed with 
the extent of their own wealth and their own ignorance, by 
the tender manner in which he regretted his wife’s impru- 
dence in being out so late in the cold, thereby endangering 
her lungs and his happiness — but she was so wilful, and so 
fond of art, and so charitable — and she had been visiting a 
poor painter, who had been laid up with fever, etc., etc., etc. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


127 


From painters to painting is a natural transition, and led 
naturally to the sight of some landscapes which were on sale 
for a charity, and which the Plinlimmons fell in love with, 
and begged might be sent to them at the Hotel Constantia ; 
and so the time was whiled away until the Lady Joan en- 
tered, radiant in amber, and black lace, and Etruscan orna- 
ments, and greeted her dearest Mrs. Plinlimmon with that 
cordial and honest warmth which was her greatest attraction 
to shy women and timid men. 

Then there entered silently without announcement one whom 
Mr. Challoner presented to the good Monmouthshire folks aloud 
as “ our valued friend the Prince loris,” and, with a sotto voce 
whisper, “ A Spanish duke as well as a Roman prince ; a god- 
son of the Pope’s.” 

And the valued friend bowed with a calm, ceremonious grace 
not common in Monmouthshire, and said some courteous phrases 
in French, and then fell back and gazed at Mrs. Plinlimmon in 
her gorgeous attire with grave amazement, and murmured to 
himself, mio I Dio mio !” 

“ You must be very civil to ’em ; they’re awfully rich, — 
made pots of money by candles,” whispered Lady Joan in his 
ear as she bade him fasten her bracelet. 

He had learned what people who were rich meant in the 
Casa Challoner, and was silent. 

He was ordered to give his arm to the Plinlimmon daughter, 
who had red hair, and was dressed in green ; and he failed to 
comprehend a word of her French, and wished those stupid, 
ill-dressed islanders would not come to bore him, and felt 
more tired all through the dinner than he had ever done in 
all his life. 

“ How absent you are, lo !” said Lady Joan, sharply, as the 
Fiordelisa woodcocks went round. 

“ loris is thinking of Mademoiselle Etoile,” said Mr. Chal- 
loner, with a grim smile. “You have often heard of Mad- 
emoiselle Etoile, no doubt, Mrs. Plinlimmon ?” 

And they discussed Mademoiselle Etoile with asperity, as 
became people at whose table she had dined six nights before. 

loris sat silent, with a flush on his face. 

Lady Joan looked at him from time to time with sus- 
picion : it was not possible that he was really thinking about 
anything but herself? 


128 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ What is the matter with you to-night ?” she muttered, 
roughly, as she rose to go to the Opera. 

loris shrugged his shoulders. 

“ Oh, ma ch^re ! when you weigh me to the earth with a 
red-haired demoiselle, with teeth like a wild boar’s and the 
bones of a giantess !” 

Lady Joan laughed and told him to hold his tongue ; they 
were as rich as Croesus. Then, quite satisfied, she let him 
fold her cashmeres about her and take her to the carriage. 

A very vain woman is always so easily lulled into content- 
ment. 

She ridiculed every note of the “ Persephone” all the way 
through it, because it amused her to do so, and because she 
had begrudged the money he had spent in helping the boy- 
composer of it. But loris, sitting in the shadow, scarcely 
heard her. He was thinking of the sunset on the hill under 
Rocca di Papa. 

He was glad when the tedious evening drew to its close and 
left him free. 

Meantime the Plinlimmons went to their hotel, enchanted 
with having met a live Italian prince, and such attention from 
so charming a household, and when they should depart to be 
in time for the assembling of Parliament (Plinlimmon being 
member for a borough) would tell everybody that the Casa 
Challoner was the most delightful house in Rome. To shy 
people the Lady Joan’s ardent cordiality was unspeakably 
precious, and to ignorant people her extensive artistic allusions 
were unspeakably imposing ; besides, she was really a Perth- 
Bouglas. To nervous persons who have made candles such a 
union of rank and good nature as she presented was altogether 
irresistible. 

“ Yes, yes ; they were chosen for us by a friend of ours. 
Lady Joan Challoner: she’d just got the like for her own 
cousin, the Countess of Hebrides,” Mrs. Plinlimmon would 
say before many objects of Italian art in her London reception- 
rooms, and would feel happy and glorious in the possession 
alike of high art and high acquaintances. Such general 
felicity could a clever woman diffuse only by smiling and 
selling a few trifles. 

The Lady Joan was catholic in her sympathies in society, and 
obeyed, the mandate of Edward the Third to his ladye-love, — 


FRIENDSHIP. 


129 


“ Bid her be free and general as the sun, 

Who smiles upon the basest weed that grows 
As lovingly as on the fragrant rose." 

For the Lady Joan never forgot that there are weeds by 
which an attentive gatherer has before this discovered a vein 
of gold in common soil, or found a fortune in a pool of borax. 

She knew that after all it is Vinfiniment petit that it is 
infinitely great. 

A woman like Etoile will be blind to this. She will he 
touched instantly by pain ; she will be moved to quick charity ; 
she will be capable of strong deed and deep thought; she 
will answer trust or appeal as a golden harp the player’s touch ; 
but the small things of life will pass by her : what is antipa- 
thetic to her she will ofiend by unconscious neglect, what is 
distasteful to her she will turn hostile by careless disdain ; 
she will go through the world doing good where she can, 
cleaving to what seems to her to be truth, and seeking un- 
wittingly only what responds to her own temperament; so 
the world is set thick with foes for her, as the path of the 
jungle with snakes. 

Lady Joan was a proud woman in her own odd fashion, and 
it hurt her pride bitterly sometimes to do so much homage to 
the Infiniment Petit ; but she did do it, and she secured the 
suffrages of all the little people who wanted to look great, 
of all the frogs who wanted to be bulls, of all the geese 
who wanted to be swans, of all the free and enlightened 
republicans who flew to a title as a moth to a light, of all 
the small gentilities who were nobodies in their own counties 
at home, but abroad gave themselves airs, and had quite 
a number of figures to their bank balance, — in francs. 

It hurt her pride sorely, yet she did it ; and, like everybody 
who is wise in his own generation, she reaped her reward in kind. 

When the Norwiches dined there on the next night. Lady 
Joan was different in character. The Norwich people were 
great, solemn, stupid, and of vast influence. He was a mar- 
quis of long descent, she the daughter and sister of a duke ; 
they were very fussy, very pompous, very proud. Lady Joan 
dressed herself in rigid black velvet, and only wore a string 
of pearls ; she was very quiet, looked classic and handsome, 
talked of her child, showed only really good things, set loris at 
the far end of the table, and spoke, if at all, distantly of 

F* 


130 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Fiordelisa as “ a place we go to in the summer. Mr. Challoner 
likes farming.” 

For the Norwich es, and such persons as the Norwiches gen- 
erally, Lady Joan was as much of a gentlewoman as she could 
be, — nervous a little, a little abrupt, too anxious for approval, 
and too careful to conciliate, but otherwise quite irreproachable. 

The Norwiches and such people as the Norwiches, going 
home, would say, “ That daughter of Archie’s lives at E-ome. 
Oh, yes, we dined with them ; oh, yes, grown a very agreeable 
woman, too, — quite quiet ; a good mother, and seems to agree 
with that person she married very well. Oh, of course we 
dined there. One must always stand up for a Perth-Douglas.” 

Now and then, indeed, — for no human mind is so godlike 
that it can altogether foresee and prevent every accident, — the 
Norwich people, or the people of whom Lord and Lady Nor- 
wich were types, were startled by coming suddenly across Lady 
Joan, without her bib and tucker, tete-a-tete with loris at some 
marble table in a Paris cafe, or some green bench at an open- 
air concert at Spa, when business had obliged her to travel, 
and she had mingled business with pleasure : the real Lady 
Joan without meeting-house clothes on ; the real Lady Joan 
who was Cleopatra by moonlight up at Fiordelisa ; the real 
Lady Joan who came home from masquerades at five in the 
morning ; the real Lady Joan who sang and smoked, with a 
dozen men about her, half the night ; and this real Lady Joan 
would startle the Norwiches and other decorous personages a 
little unpleasantly and give them a sudden sensation as of sea- 
sickness. But she would whip on her bib and tucker very 
lightly and quickly, and would explain, “ I’m on my way to 
join Mr. Challoner, and he don’t like me to travel alone ; so 
he sent loris to meet me. lo only loses my money and gets 
the wrong labels stuck on my boxes ; and of course I could 
travel by myself from here to San Francisco, but Mr. Challoner 
is always so fidgety.” 

So she would adjust bib and tucker before the caf4 mirror ; 
and the Norwiches, or the type of persons they represented, 
would be satisfied, and say to each other, “ You see her 
husband knows it; there can’t be anything in it,” and so 
would go and see her in the winter, though they had had 
that awkward view of her eating her sorbet with the hand- 
some Italian beside her, smoking his cigarette, — a situation 


FRIENDSHIP. 


131 


which would have ruined any woman of less resources and her 
ready invention. But in truth the Lady Joan was Protean, 
and slipped in and out of a dozen various skins as easily as a 
lizard slips out of its tail. 

“ Why do the great ladies go to see our Prince’s dama 
said many a good Roman matron of them all standing at one 
of the fountains in the wall to gossip with her neighbors as 
the carriages swept by to the Casa Challoner. 

They did not understand it. 

They were not aware of the golden rules of good society. 

Paolotto, the baker, had a handsome wife, who betrayed 
him for Franco, the Swiss Guard, with the fair curls, on duty 
at the Pope’s Palace yonder, and Paolotto’s wife set out at 
nightfall once too often ; and Paolotto, following, fell upon 
fair Franco with a knife, and slew the Swiss ere he had time 
to point his halberd. That they could understand. That was 
Roman and righteous, — just as much so as if it had been the 
other way, and it had been the Swiss who, by God’s grace, 
had killed the baker. Anything, so that it was man to man, 
and good steel used about it. 

But then they are barbarians still in old Trastevere. 

If Paolotto had been trained in good society, he would have 
only smiled on Franco of the yellow curls, and asked him to 
speak fair some upper scullion, so as to get the Paolotto loaves 
ordered and taken for the Vatican kitchen, and so have warmed 
his oven if his heart were cold, and made his loaves of lighter 
weight, having the Papal patronage and blessing. Poor Pao- 
lotto drew his knife instead; and, as he went through the 
streets between the Guards to pay his penalty. Lady Cardiff, 
who was passing by, looked at him and asked what he had 
done, and, hearing, smiled and said, “ Vengeance is out of 
date, like flour, my poor fellow. We have ground bones, and 
Friendship.” 


132 


FRIENDSHIP. 


CHAPTER XII. 

“ It’s lasted some years, but I don’t think they can be very 
well suited,” said Lady Cardiff, watching through her eye- 
glass the forms of loris and Mr. Challoner’s wife pass away 
down the vista of her numerous rooms, after a visit of cere- 
mony on her day. “ I don’t think they can be very well 
suited: he looks like Romance, and she like the Money 
Market. The Eros he would choose would be a soft, tender 
god of silence and shadow ; and hers is a noisy little Adver- 
tising Agent, with handbills and a paste-pot. Very bad form, 
by the way, to affidier publicly like that.” 

Etoile, who had become somewhat intimate with this mer- 
ciless speaker, and who had just then entered, reddened a 
little. 

“ You dine often with her. Lady Cardiff!” 

“ What a tragical tone of reproach 1 No, my dear comtesse, 
I don’t dine there often. ^ Far from it. I find it too expen- 
sive to have to buy a pan or a platter, or some ugly magot or 
other, every time after dinner : it would come cheaper at Spill- 
man’s. She amuses me, though. Clever woman ; knows how 
to suit herself to her society, and never knows when she has 
a rebuff. How useful that is !” 

“ Surely she never suffers one ?” said Etoile. “ Every one 
appears to like her.” A sentiment of loyalty to her absent 
old friend and to the woman whose hand she took in friend- 
ship moved her to a defence with which her convictions did 
not go. 

Lady Cardiff smiled and dropped her eyeglass. 

“ Oh, of course people like her. She’ll bore herself to 
death. There’s no more popular quality. Besides, she has 
such a tower of strength in that excellent husband of hers. 
Of all lay figures there is none on earth so useful as a wooden 
husband. You should get a wooden husband, my dear, if you 
want to be left in peace. It is like a comfortable slipper or 
your dressing-gown after a ball. It is like springs to your 
carriage. It is like a clever maid who never makes mistakes 


FRIENDSHIP. 


133 


with your notes or comes without coughing discreetly through 
your dressing-room. It is like tea, cigarettes, postage-stamps, 
foot-warmers, eiderdown counterpanes, — anything that smooths 
life, in fact. Young women do not think enough of this. 
An easy-going husband is the one indispensable comfort of 
life. He is like a set of sables to you. You may never want 
to put them on ; still, if the north wind do blow, — and one 
can never tell, — how handy they are ! You pop into them 
in a second, and no cold wind can find you out, my dear. 
Couldn’t find you out, if your shift were in rags underneath ! 
Without your husband’s countenance, you have scenes. With 
scenes, you have scandal. With scandal, you come to a suit. 
With a suit, you most likely lose your settlements. And 
without your settlements, where are you in society ? With a 
husband like that wooden creature Mr. Challoner, you are 
safe. You need never think about him in any way. His 
mere existence suffices. He will always be at the bottom of 
your table and at the head of your visiting-cards. That is 
enough. Ho will represent Eespectability for you, without 
your being at the trouble to represent Respectability for your- 
self Respectability is a thing of which the shadow is more 
agreeable than the substance. Happily for us, society only 
requires the shadow.” 

With which Lady Cardiflf, wittiest of women by heritage, 
as her grandmother had frightened Fox and almost awed 
Sydney Smith, crossed the room and lighted a fresh cigar- 
ette. 

“ And love,” said Etoile, “ where does that come in your 
arrangements ?” 

“ Olives and sweetmeats, my love,” said Lady Cardifif. “ I 
am talking of soup and fish and the roti ^ — and of the man 
who pays for them. Young women don’t think enough of 
the roti. They fall in love with some handsome ass who 
makes court to them after the style of French feidlletons^ and 
they believe life will be always moonlight and kisses. Once 
married, he spends all their money, damns them a dozen times 
a day, and keeps his smiles for other houses, while ten to one 
he is as jealous as a Turk to boot. Moonlight and kisses are 
excellent in their way, but they should come afterwards. They 
are only olives and sweetmeats. You can’t dine on them. 
Those pretty trifies are for Paolo and Francesca, not for Mr. 

12 


134 


FRIENDSHIP. 


and Mrs. Rimini. I am very immoral ? My dear comtesse, 
I am only practical. An easy -husband, who never asks ques- 
tions or cares where your letters go, — ah ! you must have 
been married to a Lord Cardiff, as I have been, to know the 
blessing of that. With an easy husband you have all the 
amusement of doing wrong and all the credit of doing right.” 

“ In this case, indeed,” she went on, “ it is that poor loris 
who pays for the roti as well as the bonhonSy which is hardly 
fair. But that does not matter a bit to Society : Society will 
always go to dinner so long as the husband sits at the end of 
the table. Disgraceful ? Oh, well, perhaps ; but if the hus- 
band like it we have no business to say so. Of course Beli- 
sarius knew Antonina once danced in nothing but a zone, and 
had always had a weakness for big biceps ; but if Belisarius 
liked to make believe that Antonina was a piece of ice incar- 
nated, Byzantium was bound to make believe so too, and to 
know nothing about the zone and the biceps. You do not see 
it ? Of course not, because you are a great artist and do not 
trouble your head to understand Society. You live on Olympus. 
We are mere mortals.” 

“ That is severe, Lady Cardiff.” 

“ No, my dear. It must be a great thing to have Cloud- 
land to resort to if Society turn one out of doors ; but to poor 
ordinary humanity, that has no heaven beyond the card-basket, 
Society has a weight that you people who are poets never can 
be brought to comprehend. I believe that you really are all 
happier if your card-basket is quite empty, because nobody 
ever disturbs your dreams by ringing at your door-bell.” 

The Marchioness of Cardiff loved to call herself an old 
woman. But she had kept three things of youth in her, — a 
fair skin, a frank laugh, and a fresh heart. She was a woman 
of the world to the tips of her fingers ; she had had a life of 
storm and a life of pleasure ; she turned night into day ; she 
thought no romances worth reading save Balzac’s and Field- 
ing’s ; she did not mind how wicked you were if only you never 
were dull. She was majestic and still handsome, and looked 
like an empress when she put on her diamonds and sailed down 
a salon. On the other hand, she would laugh till she cried ; she 
would do an enormity of good and always conceal it ; she hon- 
ored unworldliness, when she saw it, though she regarded it as a 
kind of magnificent dementia ; and, with all her sharpness of 


FRIENDSHIP. 


135 


sight, the veriest impostor that ever whined of his misery could 
woo tears to her eyes and money from her purse. She always 
wintered in Rome, and never lived with Lord Cardiff. He 
and she were both people who were delightful to everybody 
else, but not to each other. She was a Tory of the old school 
and a Legitimist of the first water; she believed in Divine 
right, and never could see why the Reform Bill had been 
necessary. Nevertheless, Voltaire was her prophet, and Roche- 
foucauld her breviary ; and though she saw no salvation out- 
side the Almanach de Gotha^ her quick wit almost drove her 
at times near the wind of Democracy. Anomalies are always 
amusing, and Lady Cardiff was one of the most amusing 
women in Europe. 

“Smoke. Why don’t you smoke?” she said to Etoile. 
“ You make me think of Talleyrand and whist. W^hat a 
miserable old age you prepare for yourself! You look grave, 
ma chere comtesse. What are you thinking about?” 

“ Pardon me. I was thinking of my friend Dorotea. She 
is blameless, and the world is cruel to her. Yet in these 
women you talk of the same world makes a jest of dishonor. 
Why? It is unjust and capricious.” 

“ When was the world ever anything hut unjust and capri- 
cious?” said Lady Cardiff. “Still, do you mean to tell me, 
really honestly, sans phrases^ that the Duchesse Santorin is 
faithful to that brute and spendthrift ?’ ’ 

“ Entirely faithful ; entirely blameless ; yes.” 

“ Dear me !” 

Lady Cardiff was so amazed that she walked the whole 
length of the room and back again. It was late in the day, 
and her visitors and courtiers had all departed ; she and Etoile 
were alone. 

“ It is no use^ you know,” she said, at last ; “ nobody’ll 
ever believe it.” 

“ Dorotea’s actions are not shaped by what people believe.” 

“ Dear me 1” said Lady Cardiff once more. 

“ When one gets among these kind of people one is all 
adrift,” she thought to herself. “ They have such extraordi- 
nary ideas.” 

“ But there was great scandal about F4dor Souroff. You 
can’t deny that,” she said, aloud. 

“ Count Souroff has a great and loyal love for her, — yes. 


136 


FRIENDSHIP. 


But he obeys her. He is in the Caucasus, trying to lose his 
life, and failing, of course, as all do who wish to lose it.” 

“ How very uncomfortable !” said Lady Cardiff. “ Then 
everybody was wrong, and she don’t care for him ?” 

“ That is a question I can have no right to reply to, I 
think.” 

“You mean she does? Then she’ll call him back from 
the Caucasus, my dear; and goodness knows why she sent 
him there. You believe her and I believe you, but nobody 
else would. Nobody r 

“ Why not?” 

“Oh, nobody, nobody! You know everybody says the 
worst they can now. They won’t let her sing at court in 
England this season.” 

“ And yet ” 

“ And yet our dear Lady Joan can go to court. Oh, yes ; 
and Mrs. Henry V. Clams too, and ten hundred others like 
them. You don’t seem to understand. Your friend may 
have Count Souroff killed and buried in the Caucasus. It 
won’t make any difference. Society has made up its mind.” 

“ And why ? What has she done, except be innocent ?” 

“ Oh, dear, dear ! what has that to do with it ?” said Lady 
Cardiff, vexed as by the obtuseness of a little child to under- 
stand the alphabet, and thinking to herself, “ One can’t tell 
her it’s because the woman is an artist: she’s an artist 
herself.” 

“ It seems to me the main question,” said Etoile, as she 
rose and gathered up her furs. 

“ That is because you live in Cloud-land, as I tell you,” 
said Lady Cardiff. “ Who cares what Joan Challoner is or 
is not ? She has got a well-trained husband, and we have to 
receive her, though we grin behind her back. Who cares 
what your beautiful friend is or is not ? She has got a bad 
name, and she will be hanged for it, like the poor proverbial 
dog that had one. You seem to me, my dear Comtesse Etoile, 
to take life far too terribly seriously. To your poetic temper 
it is a vast romance, beautiful and terrible, like a tragedy of 
^schylus. You stand amidst it entranced, like a child by 
the beauty and awe of a tempest. And all the while the 
worldly-wise, to whom the tempest is only a matter of the 
machineries of a theatre, — of painted clouds, electric lights. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


137 


and sheets of copper, — the worldly-wise govern the storm as 
they choose, and leave you in it defenceless and lonely as old 
Lear. To put your heart into life is the most fatal of errors : 
it is to give a hostage to your enemies whom you can only 
ransom at the price of your ruin. But what is the use of 
talking? To you, life will be always Alastor and Epipsy- 
chidion, and to us, it will always be a Treatise on Whist. 
That’s all !” 

“ A Treatise on Whist ! No ! It is something much worse. 
It is a Book of the Bastile, with all entered as criminal in it 
who cannot be bought off by bribe or intrigue, by a rogue’s 
stratagem or a courtesan’s vice !” 

Lady Cardiff laughed, and wrapped the furs about her guest 
with a kindly touch. 

“ The world is only a big Ilarpagon, and you and such as 
you are Maitre Jacques. ^ Puisque vous Vavez vouliiV you 
say, and call him frankly to his face, ‘ Amre, ladre., vilain., 
fesse-mathieu F and Harpagon answers you with a big stick 
and cries, ^ Apprenez d parler F Poor Maitre Jacques! I 
never read of him without thinking what a type he is of 
Genius. No offence to you, my dear. He’d the wit to see 
he would never be pardoned for telling the truth, and yet he 
told it 1 The perfect type of genius.” 

Etoile went home thoughtful, and with a vague sense of 
trouble upon her. 

She had taken as a residence part of an old palace, entered 
from the Montecavallo, but with all its great windows looking 
into the Bospigliosi gardens. The rooms were immense, 
vaulted, noble in form and proportion, with frescoes that were 
beautiful with the gorgeous fancies of some nameless artist 
of the days of the Carracci. Here she installed herself for 
the winter at her ease, and here she felt as if she had already 
dwelt for twenty years. Of one great chamber, with deep em- 
brasured casements, she made her favorite apartment, half 
studio, half salon, and, filling the embrasures with palms, and 
ferns, and flowers, and burning oak logs and dried rosemary 
on the wide hearth, and getting about her the picturesque 
litter of old bronzes and old brocades, of casts, and sketches, 
and books, made tranquilly her home in Rome. 

She missed the strong intellectual life that had surrounded 
her in Paris, the keen and witty discussion, the versatile 

12 * 


138 


FRIENDSHIP. 


talents, the brilliant paradoxes, the trenchant logic of that 
section of the world by which she had been surrounded ; but 
in return she felt a dreamy and charming repose, a sense of 
peace and exhilaration both in one ; thought was lulled and 
basked only in the immemorial treasures of the past ; strife 
seemed far away, and the mere sense of physical life seemed 
enough. 

She regretted that she had not come unknown to all the 
motley winter world that ever and again broke the charm of 
this spell which falls on every artist and every poet entering 
Koine. She thrust it away as often as she could, but she had 
celebrity, and it had curiosity, and it buzzed about her and 
would not be gainsaid. She would fain have shut herself 
alone in her frescoed rooms when she was not among the mar- 
bles of the Vatican or the Capitol, or beneath the ilexes of 
Borghese and Pamfili. But it is not easy to escape from the 
world of ordinary men and women, or to escape publicity, 
when you have a public name ; and people were eager to visit 
Etoile and say that they had seen her at home, with her olive 
velvet skirts, and her old Flemish laces, and her background 
of palms, and her great dog on her hearth, and on her easel 
some sketch half covered with some relic of gold brocade. 

“ As they must come some time, let them all come together, 
and not spoil the week,” she said, with a shrug of her shoulders, 
and named Sundays for her martyrdom. 

“ I will not come on Sundays,” murmured loris, as he heard 
her say it. 

Etoile smiled. “ Oh, yes, you will, — if your sovereign mis- 
tress order you to accompany her.” 

Flaii-ilf said loris, with a look of innocent uncon- 
sciousness ; then added, in a low tone, “ You are pleased to be 
cruel.” 

The Casa Challoner itself received on a Wednesday, making 
on that day a solemn religious sacrifice to the Bona Bea. It 
was specially swept and garnished, morally as well as actually ; 
the pipes and cigars were locked up, the too-suggestive statu- 
ettes put out of sight, the good-looking slaves all banished ; 
and little Efiie, prettily dressed, was prominently petted by her 
mother ; Mr. Challoner was as cordial and communicative as 
nature would permit him to become, and Lady Joan was as 
full of proper sentiments and domestic interests as if she were 


FRIENDSHIP. 


139 


a penny paper or a shilling periodical. In her bevy of Eng- 
lish dowagers, American damsels, and Scotch cousins, amidst 
the bankers’ and consuls’ and merchants’ wives, the small gen- 
tilities and the free-born republicans. Lady Joan was sublime: 
she would have been worthy the burin of Balzac and the 
crowquill of Thackeray. 

loris was usually banished from these Wednesdays, but 
Lady Joan would generally speak of him once in five minutes. 
“ lo’s gone to get me some camellias,” or “ lo’s gone to look 
at some pictures.” Or she would turn over the photograph 
album before Mrs. Grundy and say, “ Yes, that’s lo : you met 
him here last week. Handsome? Well, we don’t think him 
quite that, but we’re very fond of him, poor fellow.” 

And Mrs. Grundy would go away quite satisfied, and take 
her daughter on the following Wednesday; for Mrs. Grundy 
will suppose anything rather than it were possible for anybody 
to deceive herself 

“ Showed me the man’s likeness openly, her husband stand- 
ing by, and the dear bishop,” Mrs. Grundy would say, after- 
wards. “ Of course there’s nothing in it , — nothing I Do 
you suppose she would show me his photograph if there were ? 
It is the purest friendship, — the most perfect kindness.” 

All the bankers’ and consuls’ and merchants’ wives, all the 
small gentilities and the free-born republicans, who did not go 
to the Sundays on Montecavallo, used to compare her admirable 
Wednesdays, with the teapot and the small talk, to those in- 
iquitous Sabbath-days. 

“ They say you can’t see across the rooms for the smoke at 
the Comtesse Etoile’s ; there are all kinds of liqueurs ; anybody 
plays and sings that likes. The Prince of Scheldt sung heaps 
of cafS-chantant and guard-room songs last Sunday, and imi- 
tated Teresa and then cats on the roofs — oh ! scandalous, 
quite scandalous I They say ” 

And, being shut out from the Sundays, they would go and 
take the tea and mufl&ns on a Wednesday, and feel what a 
blessing it was to move only in irreproachable society. 

“ Yes, I don’t go on the Sundays either ; at least, I go 
very seldom,” said Lady Joan, and let a shade of regret on 
her frank face hint the rest. 

“ The Etoile Sundays are delightful,” said Lady Cardiff, 
who did go, and was reassured that she had done quite right 


140 


FRIENDSHIP. 


in going by meeting Princess Yera in the doorway, and an- 
other ambassadress a little farther on. “I like her very 
much ; I like her immensely ; though she never does seem to 
see that Somebody is Anybody, and was contemptuous, actu- 
ally contemptuous^ to the Prince of Scheldt ; while she was 
everything that was amiable to some horrid little snuffy crea- 
ture, eighty years old, who happened to have all Beethoven 
and Schumann at his fingers’ ends. Yes, I like her. She 
seems to look over one, through one, past one ; and that isn’t 
comfortable or complimentary ; but she pleases me. She isn’t 
a bit like anybody else. She makes me think of Sappho and 
St. Dorothea. What are you laughing at, pray?” 

loris, despite his protest, did come now and then on the 
Sundays, but he came alone and rarely. 

To Etoile he said, “ You have said I am a slave ; I will not 
exhibit myself with my chains on to the merciless raillery of 
your eyes, and — -I do not care to come when others monopolize 
you.” 

To Lady Joan he said, “ Ah, ma cltlre^ you know that 1 
am afraid of ‘ celebrities.’ Leave me in peace. I see her too 
often as it is in your house for my tranquillity.” 

That was no lie ; but his hearer did not understand it in 
its true sense, and was pleased and satisfied. 

“ lo won’t go near her if you drag him with ropes,” she 
said to her watch-dog, Marjory Scrope. 

The watch-dog, with a keener and sharper flair had 
already smelt danger. 

And once, twice, thrice the watch-dog, going to copy the 
Rospigliosi Aurora, on an order of Lord Fingal’s, saw a tall 
and slender form that she knew pass the palace-gate of 
Etoile in bright mornings at noontide. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


141 


CHAPTER XIIL 

“ Bought it for eight hundred francs, and can sell it, my 
dear madam, for a hundred thousand, honor bright 1” the 
O’Glennamaddy, an Irish member of Parliament, was calling 
out in highest glee in the Lady Joan’s morning-room. “ Two 
men scrubbin’ the dirt off all day long, and two dozen sheets 
of waddin’ used already ; it’s almost clane ; and it’s a real 
great picture ! What school, madam ? Oh, it’s not a picture 
of a school at all : it’s a ‘ Salutation to the Virgin,’ madam, 
twelve feet by twenty. Who By? Ah, now, that I’m not 
sure of, but it’s a very old master. Cara — Cara — Caradog- 
gia. I’ll be thinkin’. Count Burletta says I’d get a hundred 
thousand to-morrow for it aisy ; but I’ll not be selling it. I’ll 
send it home to the ould place. It’s a wonderful place, 
madam, is Rome, for pickin’ up treasures in the dirt, and I 
cannot be grateful enough to ye for having put me in the way 
of doin’ it. With a little ready money, and a little knowledge, 
it’s wonderful what a fortune one may make. Not that I’m 
wantin’ one; but when one has children there’s never too 
much broth in the old pot, — is there, now ? Only eight hun- 
dred francs my picture ! — think o’ that ! Say, countin’ cleanin’, 
and the waddin’, a thousand all told. And lyin’ without a 
purchaser ever since the conquest of Italy by Bonaparte ; and 
such a mass of soot and dust, that if your good husband hadn’t 
pointed out the value of it to me I’d have taken it for a 
chimney-board and nothin’ better. Indeed I would. What 
a thing it is to be clever ! And didn’t ye say ye’d take me to 
a new shop to-morrow mornin’ that ye know of? — that is, I 
mane, an old shop. I love an antique bronze, madam, better 
than anythin’ in the world, — mighty old, ye know, madam, 
and green as grass, with plenty of pattern on it.” 

“ You mean patina,” said the Lady Joan, repressing a 
smile. “ Dear O’Glenn, of course I shall be only too de- 
lighted to take you anywhere or serve you in any way ; and 
ab^out the picture I’m enchanted. Such a find as that don’t 
occur once in a dozen years ; and if Mr. Challoner hadn’t 


142 


FRIENDSHIP. 


been so fond of you he would never have let you run off with 
it. I’ll come and see it to-morrow, and bring lo. And now you 
must stop for luncheon. I’ve got some real Southdown thyme- 
fed meat for you ; I sent over for the breed myself. They’d 
such wretched, long-legged, fleshless beasts at Fiordelisa when 
I went there first ! ^ow our mutton fetches far and away 
the first price in the market ; indeed, Spillman buys it up 
always.” 

“ What a treasure of a woman ye are !” sighed the 
O’Glennamaddy. “ Ye know everything, from antiquity to 
mutton ! Quite amazin’ ! Ah, sir, ye’ve drawn a prize indeed 
in your marryin’ ; and few prizes it is that there are !” 

Mr. Challoner bowed, — gratified. 

The O’Glennamaddy could not stop for the mutton, being 
very busy, and post-haste on his way back for the opening of 
the Dublin season ; and the Lady Joan was not ill pleased 
that he could not. The O’Glennamaddy was a delightful 
person, of a childlike faith and an elastic purse, but she had 
had enough of him. Moreover, she expected Etoile to lunch- 
eon, having organized a party to the Grotto of Egeria, and she 
would not have cared for her to hear of the Salutation of the 
Virgin and the sheets of wadding. 

She herself was in high spirits, having received a rather 
chillily-worded invitation for herself and husband, and their 
friend the Prince loris, to go up and breakfast with her 
mighty cousins the Hebrides, who had just come to their big 
villa outside by the Porta Pia. But she did not mind its 
being chilly ; it would serve her purpose as well as if it were 
warm. A single invitation to breakfiist or dinner at the 
Countess of Hebrides’ always filled Mrs. Grundy’s mouth 
with sweetness and silence safely for the season. True, neither 
the Earl nor the Countess of Hebrides liked her, and asked 
her as little and as coldly as possible to their house. But 
what of that ? 

Lady Joan floated herself by means of her big relations as 
swimmers in a storm by air-belts. Cousins very near to her 
might come to study art in Borne ; but if they studied it in 
humble dwellings, and had no taste or figure for Society, their 
relationship was sternly rejected at the Casa Challoner. But 
when cousins removed twice a hundred times, as Scotch 
cousins can be, came with pretty handles to their names, and 


FRIENDSHIP. 


143 


cousins at the great hotels, the hospitality of the Casa Challoner 
was truly Highland in its lavishness, and a series of excellent 
dinner-parties proclaimed the new arrival and the near relation- 
ship to the city. 

Nothing could exceed the cordial good understanding of 
Mr. Challoner and his wife at such times as these. They 
walked together, drove together, never spoke without a smile, 
and called each other “ my love” and “ my dear” with the 
most excellent reciprocity. 

The Countess of Hebrides, who had always wondered at 
the odd marriage “Archie’s daughter” had made, was obliged 
to concede that the mesalliance had turned out better than 
might have been feared, and that the husband seemed a good 
creature ; and so let the good creature make purchases for her 
in Etruscan jewelry, and Castellani necklaces, and Roman 
antiquities, and modern Fortunys and Tito Contis. 

The mighty Hebrides never stayed very long at a time ; 
but these great people are like the sun, and leave a trail 
of glory behind them long after they have passed out of sight. 

The after-glow of them rested on the Casa Challoner and 
gilded it like the Ark of the Covenant in the sight of all the 
artists, and journalists, and hric-d,-brac collectors, and trans- 
atlantic wayfarers who made the sum of their daily society, 
and who drifted perpetually in and out of their hospitable 
chambers, and who in return defended everywhere the 
Challoner reputation with as much ardor and perhaps as little 
discretion as they defended a doubtful Guercino that they 
wanted to sell, or an antique Pausanias of which everything was 
modern except the right ear. 

The Society of the Winter Cities is motley. There are 
two parts to it, — the small fish that always live in the foreign 
water, and the bigger fish that only float through it. The 
fish that live in the water, who for the most part have mould 
on their backs of some “story” or another, and cannot well 
live in their own native streams, vie with each other for the 
big fish that only come to tarry for a season, with all the glory 
of diamond-bright scales upon them, and all their signet-marks 
as monarchs of the deep. When a big fish arrives, the little 
fish all rush to catch the shadow of his glory ; and there are 
no bigger fish anywhere than these salmon from north of 
Tweed with which the Lady Joan claimed kinship. 


144 


FRIENDSHIP. 


And it was her mighty skill in catching the big fish that 
kept herself in smooth waters. 

Mrs. Macscrip, the banker’s wife, whose father had driven a 
wheelbarrow and wielded an auctioneer’s hammer in New 
York, would not quarrel with a woman who could ask her to 
luncheon with that very great lady the Countess of Hebrides. 
Mrs. Middleway, the evangelical pastor’s better half, could 
only eagerly return calls that brought her into the same cham- 
bers with that really noble and Christian gentleman. Lord 
Fingal ; and all the rest of the little people who were the 
mouthpieces of that irresistible potentate Mrs. Grundy would 
not be either cold or censorious on any one who could call 
half the Peerage “ my cousins.” 

Lady Joan pleased Mrs. Grundy, and most other women, 
for many reasons. 

First of all, she was indisputably a lady in her own right 
and a Perth-Douglas ; and, besides, there was that floating im- 
pression that she had something to hide, and something to 
fear, which enabled them to feel above her level. Water may 
like to find its own level, but women do not. Again, she took 
extreme trouble to conciliate her own sex. She was morbidly 
anxious about their estimate of her: her braggadocio often 
veiled a quaking pulse. For women she hung her Christmas- 
tree with pretty trifles ; for women she bought tickets at 
charity balls, and gave them lavishly away to large families of 
marriageable daughters ; for women she gave her carefully cal- 
culated dinners when a duke’s eldest son or a rich unmarried 
commoner was passing through Rome; for women, indeed, 
she would even go so far as to find among all her roha^ a few 
lengths of real old Venetian lace, or a genuine rococo locket, 
and let some happy fair one go off with it really at a bargain. 
And all this study and self-sacrifice brought her in a rich 
harvest. 

For any harvest is rich to us that is the one of our desire ; 
and the light of Lady Joan’s eyes was her own face reflected 
in a Louis Quinze mirror at some great banker’s ball, and her 
own name inscribed on the books of some hotel where some 
royal princess was staying ; her own Delft card-plate filled with 
polished pasteboard, and her own little drawing-room packed 
with persons who were Personages. 

Throughout Society there is everywhere to be met with a 


FRIENDSHIP. 


145 


large class of well-born people who want perpetual amusement 
and cannot pay for it. They are the offshoots of the nobilities 
of nations ; the flowers that are next the rose ; the fringes of 
the purples ; the crumb of the cake. They are nicely man- 
nered, frothily educated, have tastes wider than their purses, 
are utterly useless, and like to be amused from one year’s end 
to the other without its costing them greatly. They like to 
use other people’s carriages, to have other people’s opera-boxes, 
to dine out constantly, to get innumerable pleasantnesses with- 
out having their pride hurt by any approach to patronage ; 
because they are gentlefolks, — always gentlefolks, — only they 
like life to be a merry-go-round on other people’s horses. 

It is a large class, and a gay one, and an amiable one, and 
a very grateful one, — so long as you are able to entertain it. 
When the day comes that you cannot do so, it will forget you : 
that is all. 

It will not be bitter about you : it has not mind enough 
for that: it will only forget you. It is always enjoying 
itself. 

It is a class which abounds in all cities of pleasure ; and 
its suffrages are to be bought. What pleases it it will praise ; 
and these praises are like little puffs of south wind : they will 
send up a monster balloon like a soap-bubble, if only there be 
but enough of them. 

The Lady Joan, who had been born among the purples, but 
had been forced to live among its fringes, courted this num- 
erous class, and succeeded with it. 

“ I took lo to my dear Hebrides ; they are so fond of him 1” 
she would be able to say for a twelvemonth ; so she thought to 
herself now, receiving the Hebrides’ invitation; and in her 
mind’s eye she could see all the bankers’ and consuls’ and 
merchants’ wives, all the little gentilities, and all the freeborn 
Americans, running about, and saying, with virtuous lips, 
She took him to the Hebrides’ 1 How can there be anything 
in it?” 

And if ever Lady Joan blessed Providence she blessed it 
for Scotch cousinship. 

At this moment, however, she put aside both the great 
Hebrides, and the Salutation to the Virgin, and arrayed 
herself in the character she always wore for Voightel’s friend. 

She wore many characters, according to her spectators. For 
G 13 


146 


FRIENDSHIP. 


the great Scotch cousins she was a very happy and virtuous 
wife, — ill placed, indeed, in a social position unworthy of her, 
but with qualities that would have graced a duchess’s coronet. 
To the world in general she was a much-enduring and much- 
forgiving martyr, — a sacrifice by her family to the golden calf, 
and heroically pressing the knife of sacrifice meekly to her 
bosom. To a chosen few she was an adventurous, devil-may- 
care, high-spirited creature, who threw her cap over the mill 
and didn’t care who saw it in the air. To herself she was 
a combination of fine mind and fearless nature, a sort of 
Madame Tallien dashed with the virile vigor of a Lady of 
Lathom. 

But even the chosen few never saw her as she actually was, 
and it may certainly be averred that she herself never did. 
She thought she had a will of iron, a brain of steel, a daunt- 
less courage, and a matchless wit. She never dreamed that 
she was after all only a terrible coward at heart, disguised in 
a fine swagger like Pistol’s, having neither the force in her to 
defy society nor the force in her to deny her passions. 

At this moment she arrayed herself in the part that she 
always thought most appropriate for receiving a person who 
knew Voightel and lived in Paris, and did her best to seem 
to Etoile a clever, brilliant woman of the world, with honest 
outspokenness of tongue and fearless utterances of advanced 
thought, yet one that never afiected to be altogether above the 
mundane amusements of a pleasant society that adored her as 
one of its leaders. 

“ So delighted to see you ! so kind of you to come !” she 
cried, with that cordiality of welcome which looked so real 
when she did not upset it with a bit of rudeness or bad tem- 
per. “You are always with Princess Vera, aren’t you? 
How can you condescend to such small folks as we are? But 
I’m charmed that you do. Will a feminine Velasquez like 
yourself deign to help me in a most important question? 
Look here at all these old plates. lo’s brought them for me 
to pick out a costume for the Clams’s fancy ball. What do 
you say to this — or this? They’re all very stiff, but that 
style rather suits me, I think, and I’ve lots of brocade doing 
nothing. Don’t you think this one, if it were made of ruby 
velvet, and the stomacher sown with seed-pearls ? I bought 
a lot the other day. And the ruff will be becoming. And 


FRIENDSHIP. 


147 


I’ve heaps of old Venetian prints. lo says these plates aren’t 
correct. He’s some old family portrait he wants me to dress 
like. You know he’s such a fidget about historical accuracy. 
He made himself wretched the other night because my Louis 
4’reize costume had eighteenth-century buttons on it and lace 
only fifty years old. He said I was a dancing anachronism. 
Good gracious ! here he is, — come to luncheon, actually, — a 
thing he never does. That’s because youWe here ! My dear 
lo, can’t you throw your coat down without breaking those 
tulips all to pieces ?” 

The fallen petals of the tulips made her eyes darken angrily. 
Why did he come to luncheon wLen he was not ordered ? Of 
course when ordered he had to come, no matter how inconve- 
nient to himself ; but any sign of an independent will in him 
was a glimpse of that cloven hoof of rebellion which she had 
believed that she had crushed under forever. 

When he rebelled she always made him ridiculous. Before 
he could speak, she tossed him the costume drawings. 

“ Here ; Comtesse Etoile has chosen this dress for me,” she 
called to him. “ Take a pencil and write out what the stuff 
and all ought to be on the margin, and then Mariannina can 
follow your notes. Have you been to the Palmiro sale ? I 
hope to goodness you didn’t let that Capo di Monte slip through 
your fingers. Has Davis’s agent got it ? Oh, good heavens, 
lo, what a fool you are ! I knew how it would be if I didn’t 
go myself! Mr. Challoner’ll be furious. There’ll be no peace 
for a week. It’s always so wLen you do anything alone.” 

“J/a chhre, the person from London ” began loris. 

But she never indulged him by hearing his explanations. 

“ Nonsense ! Of course Davis’s agent got it if you weren’t 
quick enough. Don’t talk rubbish. You know well enough 
I’d told you to get it at any price, — any price. It will fetch 
hundreds in Pall Mall. All the rest of the Palmiro things 
were trash, but that was worth any money. But it’s always 
so when you go alone. Have you had those grapes and 
woodcocks sent up to the Hebrides ? Did you send to Fior- 
delisa for the camellias for to-night? And have you told ’em 
to blister Pippo ? Oh, you’ll be going to the stable to sit with 
him. What do you think he did do ?” she pursued, turning 
to Etoile. “ When his old mare was blistered last summer he 
stayed with her all day long, because he thought she felt the 


148 


FRIENDSHIP. 


pain less if he stroked her ! I believe he’ll want to give the 
hares and foxes anaesthetics before we shoot ’em next ! There 
he was all day long in the mare’s stall, reading Giusti and 
stroking her neck. He wore mourning when the old beast 
died.” 

“ Oh ! — cai'issima mia ! ” 

“ Oh, you know you did, or you wanted to, if I hadn’t laughed 
at you. Now, write those notes clear, so that Mariannina 
can read ’em. Ruby velvet, and just a touch here and there 
of gold. I want to use up that lame d'oro we got in the 
Ghetto. The stomacher isn’t cut right? Well, draw it the 
shape it should be. Shall it be sown with seed-pearls or 
Turkish sequins? Oh, pearls, I think. We bought all 
those ropes of ’em the other day, and I may as well wear ’em 
before ” 

“ Before we sell them again,” she was going to say, but in- 
stead, as Etoile was there, substituted a less tell-tale phrase. 

“ Before I get sick of the sight of them, lying about in that 
dish. One does get sick of pearls so soon. Now, diamonds 
never pall on you. They seem always changing. When a 
fairy sends me anything for my birthday, I wish she’d always 
send me diamonds.” 

loris sighed. He knew what that meant. And diamonds 
cost money, and he was not rich. He sketched the Venetian 
costume obediently in silence. Lady J oan walked over to him 
and rested one hand on his shoulder, and with the other 
stroked back the dark hair of his head as it was bent over 
the drawing. 

All the while she looked at Etoile furtively, as though by 
the action she would say, “ Take care what you do. This is 
mine.” 

loris moved under her touch a little petulantly. He went 
on drawing without response. 

Etoile looked at him through dreaming eyes : that delicate 
aquiline profile against the high crimson lights of the wall- 
hangings had a fascination for her as for all artists. For the 
moment she felt a sense of disgust to see those strong, firm, 
sinewy hands clasped on his shoulder like a hand that holds, 
and holds forever. She rose and turned from the sight, and 
went to a little Albano hanging near. 

loris threw his pencil away broken. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


149 


“ It is of no use drawing on that wretched paper,” he said, 
displacing the hand that was on his shoulder by a quick and, 
as it seemed, accidental manoeuvre. “ I will send you the 
costume later. It will be much easier to copy at once that 
V enetian portrait I told you of ; you shall have it by to-mor- 
row morning.” 

“ Luncheon is ready,” said the Lady Joan, curtly, and she 
went in without ceremony to her dining-room, where she 
scolded her little girl for having put on silk when she ought 
to have put on merino, and did a battle-royal with her hus- 
band about the disputed frock. Of course she did not care a 
rush about the frock, but the fierce disputation did her good. 
The child was brought up on very simple principles. What 
her father ordered her mother forbade, and what her mother 
commanded her father refused. The child had quickly learned 
how to get all she wanted by the mere process of pitting them 
one against the other. 

“ Mamma will let me have it, because papa can’t bear me 
to,” she would say to her little companions, with questionable 
grammar but the unquestionable principles proper to a young 
daughter of a house whose foundation-stone was the Triangle 
of Dumas. 

All through luncheon Lady Joan descanted on the extrav- 
agance of the offending frock, and the injury done to her by 
the loss of the Capo di Monte to Davis. 

She was a woman whose passions, like the fires in Vesuvius, 
threw up much smoke and many stones. 

loris talked of literature and art, ate only a few of his own 
grapes, and for once disregarded his hostess. 

Mr. Challoner, who always listened and watched impassive 
as Fate and as immutable, commenting on all things, and in- 
terfering in none, like the Chorus to a Greek play, — Mr. 
Challoner thought to himself that his own vengeance was 
dawning. 

But after all Mr. Challoner was a man of the world. Things 
were better for him as they were. Peace is a calmer thing 
than revenge, — especially when peace means that some one else 
is worried instead of yourself, and revenge means that you will 
be left all alone to bear the beating of the storm. 

Mr. Challoner, as a student of human nature and a mere 
mortal man, could not but enjoy the prevision that loris was 

13 * 


150 


FRIENDSHIP. 


drifting unconsciously away into love elsewhere. But Mr. Chal- 
loner, as a mari complaisant and a philosopher, knew that 
this drifting away would be a fatal blow to his own rest and 
tranquillity. 

Solomon thought a dinner of herbs with quietness better 
than a stalled ox and contention ; but modern men and women, 
who have no fancy for herbs in these days, unless mixed with 
sherry and soles by an excellent cook, contrive by these tacit 
and amicable arrangements to obtain both the ox and the 
quietness. 

Compromise is the note of the present century and the 
choice of all wise men. Arbitration instead of arms ; dam- 
ages instead of vengeance ; give-and-take instead of cut-and- 
thrust ; universal doubt and polite suspicion instead of frank 
faith or stout denial. Compromise everywhere, caretaking, 
timorous, shrewd, dubious, apprehensive, wise; compromise 
is the supreme art of the nineteenth century. 

Mr. Challoner and his wife studied this great theory to 
perfection ; and it was only because they, like the greatest of 
mortals, were human that they sometimes forgot its rule so far 
as to quarrel about their shares of a picture’s profits or fling 
their respective secrets at each other’s head. This was very 
seldom ; and, besides, what did it matter ? It was only when 
nobody else was there. 

“ You think me very insincere?” murmured loris to Etoile, 
a quarter of an hour later. 

“ Insincere ? What have I said ?” 

“ In words nothing. Your eyes say it.” 

“ My eyes are very ill-bred, then.” 

“ Nay, tell me the truth.” 

“ Well, I should think you were very frank by nature, but 
are somewhat false from habit.” 

“ And what makes you suppose that ?” 

“ How can I tell ? Artists, you see, are like dogs : they go 
by instinct, and draw deductions without being aware of it. 
We are unreasonable animals, not fit for drawing-rooms.” 

“ But what should make you imagine me insincere ?” 

She laughed at his persistency. 

“Well, do you not always call your friend ‘ ma chlre' when 
I only am with you both, and most ceremoniously ‘ Madame’ 
when other people are by ?” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


151 


“ Oh, that is only friendship. You must not infer more 
than they mean from such little slips of the tongue.” 

“ I infer just what they do mean, — no more.” 

loris smiled. A man cannot help smiling when one woman 
talks to him of his position with another. It is not vanity : 
it is recollection and anticipation combined. 

“ You are very mischievous, madame,” he answered, airily. 
“ Perhaps one does learn to lie in the world. Society has 
made falsehood its axle-tree, and cannot well turn round with- 
out it. But I do not think I ever should lie to you.” 

“ Why ? What is there about me ? lam not like your old 
stone Bocca della Verita, to bite the hand off all false speakers. 

“No, you are something much better,” he said, abruptly. 
“ You are one of those women who shame men into truth.” 

His eyes dwelt on her with earnestness, with warmth, with 
a passing sadness. He touched her hand with that hesitating 
timidity which in him was as successful with women as au- 
dacity. His fingers closed on hers one moment with a sort of 
supplication in the gentleness of the action. 

They were standing in the anteroom of the Casa Challoner. 
Lady Joan came through the Oriental curtain dividing the 
rooms, and saw. 

Her brows contracted, but she gave no other sign of anger. 

“Are you people ready?” she cried, in her cordial and 
ringing voice ; she had planned a drive to show her guest the 
Caffarella. “ My dear comtesse, have you got enough on ? 
You know it grows awfully cold at twilight. I was afraid Mr. 
Challoner would insist on our having his company ; but the 
dear Dean has carried him off to the English schools. Heaven 
be praised for all its small mercies! You’d never forget it if 
you heard him prose about Numa. ‘ Numa never existed at all.’ 
Well, settle it so and have done with it, I say. But not a bit 
of it : he’ll preach on for three hours and a half to prove 
that Numa was moonshine. As if anybody could prove a 
negation I Call for Eccelino. We’ll take him up at the 
Circle, I promised him ; and the other men rode on before. 
Take heaps of cigars, lo. How could you lose that Capo di 
Monte to-day? It makes me so savage. You are like a baby 
in some^things. I do believe if it wasn’t for me you’d be 
ruined to-morrow, and have to sit on the Spanish Steps to get 
halfpence. Let’s be off, or we shall have all the daylight gone.” 


152 


FRIENDSHIP. 


And Lady Joan showed herself solicitous as she got into 
the carriage that her guest should be protected by scarfs and 
furs against the hard wind blowing from the Apennines, with 
all the frank and pleasant cordiality that a wise woman displays 
when she has a grudge to pay off — by and by. 

Lady Joan laughed and talked her brightest as they rolled 
along ; and when she chose she could be very agreeable in a cheer- 
ful and offhand fashion, which won her much admiration among 
that large proportion of society which thinks good spirits a 
pretty compliment to itself. She had seen a great deal of 
men and manners ; she had seen most cities and some few 
courts ; she read human nature well, though narrowly ; she 
could tell a tale with point and humor, especially when it had 
in it a flavor of broad mirth. Within herself she was deeply 
incensed at what she had seen and heard. But then, she 
reasoned, lo could only have been making game of that stuck- 
up adventuress : he disliked Etoile ; he had always said so. 
So she was very amiable to Etoile as they drove to the Grotto 
of Egeria, and did not chastise her lover more severely than by 
bestowing all her smiles on Eccelino di Sestri, a good-looking 
courtier, who had adored herself dans le temps. 

“ lo’s my friend, of course, just as Eccelino is,” she would 
say, in her most candid manner. It was a distinguishing fea- 
ture of Lady Joan’s administrative capabilities that she could 
keep men together without their quarrelling about her. Per- 
haps the reason was that she let each of them think that she 
cheated for him all the others ; or perhaps the reason was that 
the love she inspired was not of the strongest kind. 

The carriage went out by the Albano road, under the leaf- 
less elm-trees, to the silent places where Egeria’s altar lies 
fallen under the green pall of the ivy and the wild water-fed 
moss. 

The sun was still high, the sky cloudless, and the north 
wind dropped as they entered the valley of the Almo. 

“ No doubt that unhappy Numa, if he ever did exist, must 
have been awfully bullied by his wife ; I should think she 
was a scold ; and the length of her tongue made him adore 
the Muse of Silence as much as I do when Mr. Challoner 
vouchsafes one of his historical orations,” said Lady Joan, with 
her bright laugh, as she got out of her carriage, sauntered 
down into the dell, lighted her cigar, and pitched stones at the 


FRIENDSHIP. 


153 


fallen statue that lies like a dead thing beneath the arching 
rock. 

“ All lovers adore that Muse. Numa was only like all of 
us there,” said the Count di Sestri. 

“ Do they ? I don’t know anything about lovers ; I only 
care for friends,” laughed the Lady Joan, with her cigarette 
in her white teeth. She, for her own part, did not adore 
Silence at any time, and in her own heart considered that it 
was of no use being made love to at all unless you could pub- 
lish the triumph of it right and left to your society. She 
liked to fasten her lover to her skirts as she pinned a signal- 
ribbon to her domino at the Veglione. She was not a woman 
to let her Romeo go from her when the lai-k sang ; on the 
contrary, she liked all the cocks in the neighborhood to crow 
their shrillest and call attention to him on her balcony ; though, 
of course, she would say to the cocks, like the cat in the Ani~ 
maux Farlants, “ Je suis une chatte anglaise et je n’ai point 
d’amants !” None of the animals believed the cat, certainly. 
Still, in its way the cry was useful. 

loris went forward and gathered a sprig of broom and a 
few sprays of maidenhair fern, and gave them to Etoile. 

“Juvenal would be satisfied, I suppose. He hated the 
costly marbles and the artificial ornamentation *, there is little 
enough left of them now. I am sure you, too, like it best 
as it is ?” 

“ Yes, the bubbling brook sings the fittest song for Egeria 
and poor Tatia too, who must have been so jealous of her ; I 
am sure she never cared for all her mortal rivals in the new 
city on the hills there, but Egeria must have made her heart 
ache ; Egeria, who came on the wings of the wind as she did 
herself, and came into her own temple to take his very soul 
away ” 

“Have you ever loved any one, I wonder?” thought the 
Lady Joan, turning and looking at her with a sudden 
thought. 

“ Egeria also forgave even disloyalty,” said loris, aloud. 
“ No infidelity changed her. She was faithful to him through 
death and after it.” 

Etoile smiled. 

“ Which is only to say I should think that the nymph was 
a woman after all.” 
a* 


154 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ How little you know of women !” 

“Don’t turn cynic, lo,” cried Lady Joan, flinging her 
cigar-end at the mutilated statue. “ It won’t suit you at all. 
You are naturally a cross between Faust and the young man 
in the Peaui de Chagrin ; between Romeo and Reuben, un- 
stable as water, etc., — ^you know what I mean. You are as 
credulous as a seal and as soft-hearted as a dog ; cynicism is 
for men who drink brandy, beat their wives, wear long beards, 
and never wash their hands. Nature made you ” 

Rut he lost this definition of his character, as he had wan- 
dered away after Etoile, who had gone farther down to where 
the little stream bubbled up among the mosses that had once 
been Numa’s bed. 

Lady Joan glanced after them, and lit a new cigarette. She 
knew passion and all its ways too well not to know the mean- 
ing of that silent unconscious irresistible magnetism which 
draws two unfamiliar lives one to another in the indefinable 
physical attraction which is the birth of love. But her 
natural quickness of intelligence was obscured by her over- 
weening vanity. 

“ He is only fooling her,” she thought, with indifference 
and amusement. “ After all, if he like to do that, let him.” 

If another woman were made to love her lover hopelessly, 
that would be only so much additional entertainment for her- 
self She was so sure of him, — as sure as she was of the ring 
on her hand, that would stay there forever unless she threw it 
aside. 

“ loris seems to admire that new-comer,” said the Count 
Eccelino. 

“ Oh, dear, no, he doesn’t,” said Lady Joan, coolly. “ He 
rather dislikes her, — thinks her insolent and tete monUe. 
But I’ve told him to be agreeable to her. She is a great 
favorite of Yoightel’s. You know dear old Voightel, the 
cleverest man in all Europe. We were so fond of him long 
ago at Damascus.” 

Of course he was only fooling Etoile, she said to herself, 
glancing, as she laughed with the other men about her, at 
the two figures that had strayed away side by side under the 
shadows of the trees along the stream towards the ruins that 
tradition allies with the memory of Volumnia and Virgilia, 
and with the great cry from the breaking heart of the hero, — 


FRIENDSHIP. 


155 


I melt, and am not 
Of stronger earth than others.” 

Of course he was only fooling Etoile ; he disliked her, so 
he had said a score of times ; nevertheless that solitary walk 
displeased her. 

“ Who is she ? I haven’t an idea,” she said, roughly, to 
another question of Eccelino di Sestri’s. “Of course she’s 
known all the world over, for that matter, by name ; but as 
to where she came from, I should be very sorry to have to 
answer for that. These kind of people always drop down 
from the moon, or say they do, to demonstrate that they 
didn’t jump up from the gutter.” 

“ But she is a Countess d’Avesnes ? ” 

“ Yes. That’s her name, or she says it is. It sounds very 
aristocratic ; but I don’t much believe myself in aristocracy that 
has no relations, and travels about with a big dog, and has the 
knowledge of Manon Lescaut, with the innocent airs of Una. 
Men like that sort of thing ; they believe in naked feet 
walking over hot ploughshares without a burn. AVe don’t. 
We’re more consistent. We don’t look for daisies on dung- 
heaps. It’s rubbish , you know. After all, think what that 
woman has seen ! I don’t say there’s any real harm in her, — 
Voightel would not have sent her to me if there had been, of 
course, — but it’s perfectly ridiculous to suppose that she has 
the white-paper past that she pretends tp have. She’s very 
clever, that everybody knows ; and a very clever woman can’t 
be a very innocent one, — when she’s an artist, I mean.” 

The Lady Joan concluded with a puff of smoke up into 
the traceries of the ash-boughs overhead, for she remembered 
that she always pictured herself to her world as combining in 
her owm person the two excellences which she had just declared 
to be incapable of co-existence. 

“ Calomnicz^ calomniez r said Voltaire; calomniez tou- 
jours : quelque chose resteraP 

So the Lady Joan was of opinion that if you only lie ever- 
lastingly something of it all will always be believed somewhere. 

If you are only well beforehand with your falsehood, all will 
go upon velvet ; nobody ever listens to a rectification. “ Is it 
possible ?” everybody cries, with eager zest ; but when they 
have only to say, “ Oh wasn’t it so ?” nobody feels any partic- 
ular interest. It is the first statement that has the swing and 


156 


FRIENDSHIP. 


the success ; as for explanation or retractation, — pooh ! — who 
cares to be bored ? 

She knew very well that what she said was not true. But 
Lady Joan knew also that a little fiction always came in 
handy. 

Besides, when loris had wandered away without permission 
along the bend of the water, it was only human nature to 
fling a stone after his companion. 

Moreover, she was really incredulous that any one with 
such opportunities for amusement as Etoile had possessed could 
have been idiot enough to have led as quiet a life as a rosebush 
in a nun’s lattice window. 

Men might believe it. But she was not to be taken in by 
any such nonsense. 

Fame to a woman is like the tunica incendialis of the Latin 
martyrs, and it is never the fault of other women like the 
Lady Joan if the torches of slander do not set it ablaze till 
the sulphur flames burn up the life within. 

She smiled her sunniest and kindliest, however, when the 
truants returned from the temple of Fortuna Mutabilis, as the 
first shadow of sunset fell over the grass. 

“ My dear, are you not afraid of the cold ?” she said affec- 
tionately to Etoile. “We must be moving, I fear, and leave 
the ghost of Egeria to salute the moon all alone. You must 
come back to dinner with us. Oh, yes, you must ! I wish you 
would go to the masquerade with me ; but you care so little for 
those things. You don’t get half out of life that you might, 
believe me. However, I suppose in return for all you lose 
primroses talk to you, and stones have voices, and all that kind 
of thing. I’ve more of the Peter Bell in me. Give me my 
furs, lo ; and call up the carriage. Oh, of course she’ll come 
to dinner : I won’t take any refusal. Mr. Challoner will dis- 
course of nothing but Numa, unless we’re strong enough in 
number to take him down. Of all the cants, I do think that 
new cant of proving that nothing ever was, and that nobody 
ever lived, is the very worst bore that sceptical education has 
developed. Five o’clock I Tell them to drive fast, i shall 
take you home to dinner too, Eccelino ; and I’ll give you the 
cotillon to-morrow night if you’re good at the Macscrips’.” 

Count Eccelino bowed his ceremonious thanks with an air 
of ardent gratitude. But he was too used to receive favors of 


FRIENDSHIP. 


157 


this sort whenever his friend was out of favor to be much 
flattered by them actually. As a punishment they were also 
lost upon loris, who, as they drove homeward, was silent, 
letting his dark eyes brood softly upon the face of Etoile, so 
that whenever she looked up she met their gaze in the pensive 
Roman twilight. 

She persisted in not dining with them that night, and went 
to her own room and sat and dreamed, with her head on her 
hands over a fire of oak and pine. 

“ That man is not happy,” she thought again and again ; 
and she seemed always to feel that tender hesitating touch of 
his fingers, always to see those eloquent and wistful eyes in 
the evening shadows. 

Meanwhile Lady Joan went home and dined, and then 
“ mystified” herself in loup and domino for that first Veglione 
of the year. 

She had a passion for masquerades. No scrutiny of mari- 
tal wrath drew her to heed the secrecy of that most dingy and 
prosaic of all Venushergs, — a haignoir au troisieme. No weak 
objections on the part of her lord to any pastimes of friendship 
drove her, as they drive some ill-used wives, to require the 
shelter of one of those little close-curtained cloth-hung closets, 
where the poor god of love is huddled up in a black sacque 
and his rosy mouth soiled with champagne-cup. She could 
go home with her escort at four or five in the morning, and use 
her latch-key, and Mr. Challoner, like a sensible sleeper, only 
turned cosily in his bed at the back of the house, and, if he 
woke at all at the sound of his hall-door’s unclosing, only 
thought what a fool the other man was to have danced attend- 
ance through all those hours in the noise and the heat of that 
dingy festival. 

Lady Joan had no need of masquerades. With her latch- 
key in her pocket, and her friend’s cab at her command, she 
could come and go, alone or accompanied, in that happy free- 
dom which is the privilege of a perfect conjugal comprehension. 
The cabman knew much more about her than Mr. Challoner. 

But, though she had no need of them, her soul adored the 
Veglione. That danse Macabre was the delight of her heart, 
as the Brumalia of the Roman matron’s. 

To mystify herself, or think she did so ; to laugh louder 
than with due regard to Society she ever could elsewhere ; to 

14 


158 


FRIENDSHIP. 


throw a stone and grin undiscovered and pass on ; to fasten 
strangers with her shining eyes, and jeer at them, and leave 
them ; to torment her friends and torture her foes, and sup 
and smoke and go home in the daybreak, when the masks 
were all reeling up the streets and the Carnival songs were 
greeting the sunrise, — that was pleasure to the Lady Joan. 

It requited her for a hundred dismal clerical luncheons off 
cold lamb and lettuce, with chaplains and consuls ; it fortified 
her against a thousand big dinners with her tongue tied, and 
her “ dear Robert” at the bottom of the table. 

loris sighed this evening as he fastened her mask behind 
her ears and went down with her into the dingy whirlpool. 
He was so tired of it all. 

The thin disguises, the stupid jokes, the commonplace in- 
trigues, the coarse pretence of deceiving and of being de- 
ceived, the noise, the uproar, the shrill cries, the headlong 
dances, — they had grown so tiresome. He had laughed his 
lightest and waltzed his wildest in other years ; but he was 
tired of it all — very tired — now as he walked about among 
the screaming crowd, and exchanged the vapid phrases of 
custom, with dominoes that were as well known to him as 
though he had met them in broad day, and heard the resonant 
voice of his empress ring loud above the music in merciless 
speech and worn-out jibes, and lighted her cigarettes, and car- 
ried her fan, and got her claret-cup, and thought how long 
the night was, — the boisterous, empty, joyless, senseless night, 
through which, all the while, he had to laugh and be ready 
with answer, and look amused, and turn an airy compliment, 
and join in all the mirth, and never show a yawn, but wait on 
duty till the kindly sun should rise, and so release him. 

What weariness will men endure if only it be not in the 
name of virtue ! 

“ A fine long night. Excellence 1” said the cabman, with a 
radiant smile, as loris paid him while the bells of the first 
mass rung in the dawn. 

“ A terrible long night,” thought his employer, looking up 
at the blue morning skies. 

The cabman, who, had he ever been cross-questioned by 
Society, could have rendered the clerical cold lamb forever a 
Passover of the past to the Casa Challoner, drove away joy- 
ous to get his breakfast and gamble in the sun. loris went 


FRIENDSHIP . 159 

up-stairs and shut the sun out, and threw himself on his 
bed. 

“ Good God ! once I thought this, pleasure 1” he murmured, 
as his heavy eyelids fell. 

So had he thought this, love. 


CHAPTER XIV. 

“ Chere Comtesse Etoile, pardon me, but you sow the 
earth with dragons’ teeth 1” said Lady Cardiff one afternoon, 
about four o’clock, on the Pincio. “ You cannot want en- 
emies; you really cannot want them, — you must have so 
many I I don’t wish to be rude, you know, but you must. 
Whoever shines, etc. Why will you make so many unneces- 
sary ones ? Do tell me.” 

“ What have I done ?” said Etoile, with amazement and a 
little absently. She was thinking of things that loris had 
said the night before in the Palazzo Farnese, where there had 
been an early reception. 

“ Done?” echoed Lady Cardiff. “Why, you have cut our 
beloved Mrs. Henry V. Clams dead I Unconsciously, I dare 
say, but still dead. You looked at her as you did it ; you 
did really. I must say so if they as^ me.” 

“ I did not see her,” said Etoile. “ Not that I should be 
unwilling to commit the crime consciously, if you mean that.” 

“ Good gracious ! Has she offended you ?” 

“ Not in the least ; but why should I know her ? She is far 
less educated than my maid, and very many times more vulgar.” 

“Of course ; but still why ?” 

“ With a vulgarity more blatant for the fine clothes it is 
dressed in ; a vulgarity that is not even redeemed by mere 
decency.” 

Lady Cardiff shifted her sunshade. 

“ Terribly strongly you put things ; of course they sound 
horrible when you put them like that. But everybody knows 
her. It’s a way we’ve got into nowadays. Why don’t you 
write a comedy like VEtrangere or the Famille Benoifon, 
and put all that into it ? We should applaud it on the stage ; 


160 


FRIENDSHIP. 


but it only sounds uncomfortable off; — ^you don’t mind my 
saying what I think ?” 

“ Pray always say what you think. Would you continue 
to know Mrs. Henry V. Clams if her husband were ruined to- 
morrow ?” 

“ Goodness me I of course not ; and she would never expect 
it, — never. She does know her place. There is nothing like 
a free and independent citizen for taking slights good-tem- 
peredly. I never knew how much kicking a human being 
would stand until I knew these born-democrats. One didn’t 
know them twenty years ago. I don’t know why we didn’t. 
They hadn’t struck oil, I suppose, and made it worth our 
while ; or Worth hadn’t dressed them, and they were still mere 
natural tar and feathers. Somehow we didn’t know them. 
Perhaps they hadn’t come over to ‘ Europe.’ Know her if she 
were ruined ? The idea ! You might as well ask would Fonte- 
branda continue to filer le parfait amourN 

“ Poor woman !” said Etoile. 

“ You needn’t pity her, my dear. You may be quite sure 
she knows quite well the terms on which she has my visits 
and his devotion. If all the ‘red cents’ went to-morrow, I 
dare say she’d go back across the water and ‘ keep a bar’ 
very happily. The days of strong objections and strong emo- 
tions are alike over, believe me. As for you, you are exactly 
like Moli5re’s Misanthrope ; I shall call you Alceste : 

‘ Etre franc et sincere est mon plus grand talent, 

Je ne sals point jouer les hommes en parlant, 

Et qui n’a pas le don de cacher ee qu’il pense, 

Doit faire en ce pays fort peu de residence.’ 

Dear me ! why will people go on writing ? As if Moliere 
and Fielding between them hadn’t said all that there is to be 
said better than any one else ever can say it I By the by, 
why wouldn’t you go to the Echeance ball ?” 

“ I dislike balls.” 

“Very well; if you dislike dancing don’t dance; though 
if a woman don’t, you know, they always think she has got a 
short leg, or a cork leg, or something or other that’s dreadful. 
But why not show yourself at them ? At least show yourself. 
One goes to balls as one goes to church. It’s a social muster, 
and not to be there looks odd. I wish you had gone. Our 


FRIENDSHIP. 


161 


dear Joan was in great force there; her lo behind her chair 
at supper, and she sending him about here, there, and every- 
where to do this, that, and the other. ‘ lo, hand that mayon- 
naise.’ ‘ lo, take Lady Cardiff that chicken.’ lo, reach me 
those strawberries.’ You should have heard her 1 I grinned, 
and everybody grinned, — except that admirable wooden hus- 
band. She’d got a fine set of sapphires on, and told five different 
histories in my hearing of how she did get ’em. Do you 
happen to know where she did ? ‘ To’ does, I suppose. She 

wanted us all to take shares in some Society for the Diffusion 
of Kabbits over the Campagna. It seems there are no rabbits 
in Italy. I never noticed it: did you? And we’re all to 
repair this omission of Nature and make a fortune out of 
their tails (I think it’s their tails) ; and there is no risk what- 
ever, she says ; it’s to be all pure profit. Clever creature I 
She really is great fun. Half her life is spent in being so 
dreadfully afraid people should think she has a lover, and the 
other half is spent in being so dreadfully afraid people should 
think she hasn't ! I left her at the ball, and I didn’t come 
away till five. Poor ‘ lo’ looked very much bored, I thought. 
What a very queer thing love is 1” 

Etoile was silent. She was thinking of him as he had 
been at the Palazzo Farnese earlier in the same evening. She 
felt angered — unreasonably angered — that he had gone later 
to this ball. 

“ Not that it’s hardly ever more than the mere question of 
a quid pro quo^" continued Lady Cardiff, looking up into the 
pink dome of her point-lace parasol ; “ a give-and-take part- 
nership of vanity and convenience. Throw in with the self- 
ishness of this vanity the mere animal selfishness of the senses, 
and weld them with the adhering force of habit, and you have 
the only form of love that is known to nine-tenths of our men 
and women. Passion is a dead letter to them. It would scare 
them out of their lives. They know no more of it than they 
do of God, and think no more of it than they do of 
their graves. Modern love is like modern furniture, very 
showy and sold at a long price, but all veneer. Pray, how is 
your friend with the grande passion that sends its object to 
the frosty Caucasus? I saw in yesterday’s Galignani that 
Fddor Souroff had been badly wounded in some mountain 
skirmish; Is that true? Yes? Dear me 1 Now, if he had 


162 


FRIENDSHIP. 


only taken a fancy to Mrs. Henry V. Clams or our dear Joan, 
nothing of that would have happened to him. It’s a caution, 
as Mrs. Henry would say. Ah, there’s General Hesart and 
Mrs. Desart, and Buonretiro. Pretty woman still, ain’t she ? 
Been flirting fifteen years straight through, and as ‘ fit’ now 
as ever she was. They are two of the pillars of the Casa 
Challoner. General Hesart believes in Mr. Challoner as one 
man of honor believes in another. There’s nothing so charm- 
ing as the amiability of any unamiable people when they oc- 
cupy the same position, and that a ticklish one. ‘ Ca’ me and 
I’ll ca’ thee,’ is ever present in their minds. General Hesart 
declares he is ready to put his hand in the fire if loris is any- 
thing he oughtn’t to be, etc., etc. ; and Mr. Challoner is ready 
to put his hand in the fire if Buonretiro is anything he 
oughtn’t to be, etc., etc. Beautiful reciprocity of faith ! Ah, 
my dear general, how do? Lovely weather, isn’t it ? Charlie 
gone back to Eton ? Handsome boy. How do, dear ? How 
well you look ! You miss Charlie ? To be sure, to be sure. 
One always misses school-boys, if only by the preternatural 
stillness of the house when they’re gone. Shall I see you at 
the Japanese Embassy to-night ?” 

With a few pleasant words Lady Cardiflf bade the Hesarts 
adieu, and sailed on under the palm that once saw Augustan 
Home. 

By the toy-kiosque they met again Mrs. Henry V. Clams 
and the Marquis Fontebranda ; reaching the summer-house, 
they encountered the great Huchess of Bridgewater, and her 
shadow. Lord Hauntless, who were on the eve of hastening 
home, one to the Court, and the other to the Commons ; by 
the water-clock they saw that leader of fashion the Baroness 
de Bruges, with young Ferrara, who had a face like the 
Holce Christ and was twenty years her junior; feeding the 
swans was lively Lady Eyebright, who cheated at cards and 
had her ears boxed, but was highly esteemed nevertheless, 
because she was believed to have compromised herself with 
a very high personage, and to have heaps of his letters, very 
ill spelt. Nearer the wall, looking at the sunset and her 
neighbors’ gowns alternately, was Princess Gregarine, whom 
men called “ Les vices sympathiques ugly as a Kaffir, charm- 
ing as a siren, who called herself the best-dressed gorilla in 
Europe, and whose caprices ranged from grand dukes to cor- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


163 


porals of the guard, and, except for superiority of plunder, 
preferred the latter. 

“ Delightful age we live in,” said Lady Cardiff, when she 
had nodded to them all, and stopped for her last chat, and 
was going towards her carriage. “ Such dear, virtuous women 
all these are, and so funny it is to see them where Messalina 
used to make a beast of herself with Silius ! Poor Messa- 
lina ! She was but a primitive creature, and knew no better 
than to exhibit herself in the streets ; and Claudius was an 
easy husband, and uxorious. Yet he did cut up rough at 
last. Mr. Challoner and General Desart, Bridgewater and 
Gregarine, never will. It has been reserved for the Christian 
world, which boasts of its one wife to one man, to produce a 
polygamy and polyandra side by side in its midst like the lion 
and the lamb in Revelation. We’ve drawing-room editions 
of everything, — we should have had one of the Bible and 
Bhakspeare, only that nobody ever reads them, — and so we 
have drawing-room editions of illicit love, a pretty thing that 
we can ask to dinner, nod to in church, and meet at court 
balls. Dear me ! poor Messalina was a very primitive crea- 
ture, and must have had a sort of conscience in her after all. 
We’ve none.” 

As the carriage passed outward, and went under the clipped 
ilex-trees of the Villa Medius in the rosy light of the passing 
day, under the trees they saw the Lady Joan and loris. 

Lady Joan kissed her hand with a bright and cordial smile. 

loris, as he bowed, colored and then grew very pale. 

Lady Cardiff smiled as she said, “Are they going up? 
They’ll join the Desarts, I dare say ; quite seasonable. The 
Duchess and the Gregarine are a flight above her ; even little 
Eyebright, I think, don’t favor her much. Little Eyebright’s 
no fool, though she does lose her pin-money for a year in five 
seconds at draw-poker. What a charming game, and what a 
charming name, — draw-poker ! It is such an epitome of our 
times, isn’t it? All the cards ‘ chucked,’ and the game to the 
one that ‘ grabs’ quickest. When the world had good man- 
ners it played dearth and piquet ; now it has no manners at 
all, it plays poker. It’s curious that we should have no man- 
ners, but it is true. Heavens ! to think of the old grandes 
dames I remember in my babyhood, — friends of the Lam- 
balle and the Polignac, sitters to Lawrence and poems for 


164 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Praed I Where has it all gone, — the serene grace, the grand 
courtesy, the perfect delicacy of sentiment and of phrase, the 
true consciousness of noblesse oblige ? It has gone like the 
old sweet fragrant scent of the dried rose-leaves in the rooms. 
Nobody has dried rose-leaves now. They have br'CLle-paifums 
instead, and the perfumes are as loud as their dress and their 
speech.” 

Lady Cardiff sighed as she drew up the carriage-skin 
closer. 

“ I took a pretty woman yesterday (a great lady, too, as 
place goes) to see Vassiltchikoflf’s new house. The house is 
lovely, and has worlds of pretty things : he’s a great collector. 
‘ Comme vous Ues bien instalU iciy she said to him. faut 
que fy pince quelque chosel And she carried off one of his 
best bits of Saxe, and an enamelled sweetmeat-box of Petitot’s. 
And she’d only seen him twice before. v 

“ ^ Pince r The language of the gutter, and with the lan- 
guage the manners, and with the manners the morals: of 
course ! — inevitable and perpetual conjunction. 

“ But, my dear, the supreme feminine passion of the day 
is the bourgeois passion of thrift ! In face of all our lawless 
expenditure and idiotic profusion I Yes. In face of all that. 
Perhaps because of all that. Women seldom spend their own 
money. Ask Dauntless, loris, Buonretiro, or Helene Gre- 
garine’s grand dukes. It is expensive work to be Madame’s 
‘ friend’ nowadays. Thrift is the fashionable woman’s master- 
motive : it’s only a means to an end ; she gets that she may 
squander. She is the miser and the heir in one person. She 
seldom wears a dress three times, it’s true, and never heeds 
the loss of one ; but that is a matter of vanity and rivalry. 
To make up for it, she insures her chemises, underpays her 
governesses, sells her wardrobe when she has to go into mourn- 
ing, borrows from her friends, and plunders from her lovers. 
In all her romances she keeps a weather eye open to what 
will pay, and, when she is insisting on a separation, never 
adores Don Juan so much but what she keeps hold of her 
money if she can. That most poetic and transparent soul. 
Princess Milianoff, wore mourning here all Carnival, because her 
lover was sent out of the country ; ruined her family by her head- 
strong passion ; told Milianoff flat to his face that she loathed 
him and everything belonging to him, and adored Stornellino 


FRIENDSHIP. 


165 


and meant to live -with him at all costs ; but all the same she 
stipulated that she should have all the Milianoflf’s jewels, and 
even asked for the twelve footmen’s liveries, and all their silk 
stockings. Impossible, you say? No ; a fact, my dear. A plain, 
hard, absolute fact. The lawyers heard her. People who say 
‘ Impossible’ don’t know our world ; that’s all. She was mad 
about Stornellino, but all the same she thought she might as 
well plunder while she could from her husband. The women 
of our day don’t perceive when they drop to bathos. They 
make absurd anti-climaxes, and never see the ridicule of them. 
Madame Milianoff was superb in her wrath and her beauty, 
deaf to her sister’s prayers, blind to her father’s tears, ad- 
amant to her husband’s upbraiding, declaring by all the 
powers that were that she loathed even her child because 
her child was also his. It was a scene of Medea, of Phaedre, 
of Lucrezia, — but all the same she fought for every one of 
her diamonds, and remembered the footmen’s silk stockings. 
Now, if there were a living Beaumarchais to put that on the 
stage, who’d believe it ? And yet it is a fact, I tell you. A 
fact as hard as a pebble. All thrift, my dear; all thrift. 
That is why there is no passion in our day. They have sen- 
sual fancies like rockets, that make a great rush and blaze for 
a second, but they are always fastened to a gold stick of solid 
bullion, and when the rocket evaporates in the air the stick 
comes down to the ground, — and they keep it. When the 
woman of our day publishes her ^ Souvenirs de mes Tendresses,^ 
she need only edit her banker’s book, — with a key and an ex- 
planatory note or two. ‘A la place du coeur ellc rH a qyHune 
lettre de change' If the quotation is not textually correct 
it ought to be : it would have been if Hugo had known as 
much of our world as he does of little Jeanne. By the way, 
Joan Challoner will get that royal subsidy, they say, out of 
the ministers for her Messina Bridge, to prop it up a little 
while. I dare say that’s why she looks so smiling to-day. 

“ Ah ! all her efforts seem very puny and petty to you, no 
doubt ; but, in point of fact, those efforts mean veiy much. 
They mean perpetual humiliation, constant self-restraint, con- 
tinual strain, incessant vigilance. Only fancy what it must 
be to that fiery-hearted violent creature to choke down her 
temper, to control her scorn, to hide her passion, to veil her 
disdain, perpetually to stoop and eat dust in the sight of every- 


166 


FRIENDSHIP. 


body, and bring her tameless tongue to utter all the humble 
pie of commonplace and compliment ! What a purgatory it 
must be, you say ? N — no ; hardly that. A continual effort 
certainly, but she is sustained in it by her anxiety to succeed ; 
and, after all, very likely she feels the fun of the whole thing, 
and grins all day behind her mask. 

“ It is nothing new, all this, though you fume about it now, 
as Alceste fumed and fretted in his time. Society always had 
its fixed demands. It used to exact birth. It used to exact 
manners. In a remote and golden age there is a tradition that 
it was once contented with mind. Nowadays it exacts money, 
or rather amusement, because if you don’t let other folks have 
the benefit of your money, Society will take no account of it. 
But have money and spend it well (that is, let Society live 
on it, gorge with it, walk ankle-deep in it), and you may be 
anything and do anything ; you may have been an omnibus- 
conductor in the Strand, and you may marry a duke’s 
daughter. You may have been an oyster-girl in New York, 
and you may entertain royalties. It is impossible to exag- 
gerate an age of anomaly and hyperbole. There never was 
an age when people were so voracious of amusement, and so 
tired of it, both in one. It is a perpetual Carnival and a per- 
manent yawn. If you can do anything to amuse us you are 
safe, till we get used to you, — and then you amuse us no 
longer, and must go to the wall. Every age has its price : 
what Walpole said of men must be true of mankind. Any- 
body can buy the present age that will bid very high and 
pay with tact as well as bullion. There is nothing it will not 
pardon if it see its way to getting a new sensation out of its 
leniency. Perhaps no one ought to complain. A society with 
an india-rubber conscience, no memory, and an absolute indif- 
ference to eating its own words and making itself ridiculous, 
is, after all, a convenient one to live in, — if you can pay for 
its suff'rages. Panshanger Pomfret married out of his own 
rank the other day. We were horrified. We were outraged. 
We had no words to express our sense of the infamy that gave 
a great man and seventy-five thousand a year to a woman 
whom nobody know. We found out all about her in a month, 
that she had been on the boards of fifth -rate theatres, that 
she had sung in music-halls and danced in tights, that she 
had been to chimney-sweeps’ balls, that she had cooked saus- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


167 


ages and sold gin-sling, that she had hired a fictitious mother 
out from an unmentionable place in New York, in short, that 
there was nothing that she hadn’t done, and we ran a neck- 
and-neck race as to who should know the last newest and vilest 
story about her. Well, Pan Pomfret took the bull by the 
horns, and gilded the horns. (They seldom prick then^ my 
dear.) London, and Paris, and Italy were dazzled by his 
wealth and summoned to his entertainments. He got his 
cousin to present her at court, and his sister to receive her, 
and down the throat of the rest of the world forced her like 
a very big golden pill. II commit son mondcy my dear. Luxe 
in London, luxe in Paris, luxe in Rome ; and Society bidden 
to enjoy it; and, above all, luxe with tact, like minever on 
white satin. Nothing resists the two, — nothing. They make 
a sovereign’s robes, in which a beggar will look regal. It is 
only a year since he married her, but there is nothing on 
earth more successful than Panshanger Pomfret’s wife. Sang 
in music-halls 1 Danced in tights ! Heavens ! my dear, we 
would all swear till we were black in the face that the pub- 
lic never saw so much even as the very tip of her nose. She 
did sing in private concerts, in Park Lane and Portman 
Square, and, W'e think, once at Buckingham Palace. But 
anything else, my dear ! anything else ! why, we never heard 
of such slander, — never! We see, hear, and feel her only 
through a golden shower, as Danae saw, heard, and felt 
Jupiter; and what a difference it makes in our sentiments I 
Mr. Challoner’s wife can’t be Panshanger Pomfret’s, but in 
her little way she goes on the same principle. The Pom frets 
go in for treble events at four figures, and the Challoners for 
selling-races and shilling sweepstakes, but the principle is 
the same, — the only principle, indeed, that will ever succeed 
nowadays. 

“ Believe me. Society is a plant that must be fed and 
watered, and dug and matted scrupulously,” continued Lady 
Cardiff, gravely, as they rolled homeward through the sunset- 
lightened streets. ' “ If you do not take endless trouble with 
it, it will never blossom for you. Are there not dukes and 
duchesses nearly as obscure as Jones and Brown ? Are there 
not millionnaires — ay, billion naires, for that matter — who live 
hidden under their gold as utterly as if it were a dust-heap ? 
Why do you see a marchioness a nonentity whose name is 


168 


FRIENDSHIP. 


barely known off her estates, and a new-comer, who has noth- 
ing but her shrewd sense and her pleasant manner, pushed 
up into a leader of fashion ? It’s all a matter of trouble and 
tact, my dear; nothing more. It isn’t what you have, but 
how you spend it. It isn’t what you are, but what you appear 
to be. It isn’t rank, or brains, or riches, or conduct; you 
may have any one of them, or you may have them all, and 
yet they may avail you nothing. You may remain obscure. 
Look at Lady Kencarrow in London now, — not pretty, not 
clever, not witty, a third-rate actress in the country, as any- 
body knows, and yet what a success ! Princes of the blood 
go to dine with her ; her house is the very temple of distinction. 
All a matter of tact, my dear, and of attention. She has 
devoted her life to getting a Position. She has succeeded. 
Nothing succeeds like success. You people who are very 
clever, or very proud, or very careless never — pardon me — 
succeed with Society. You make a stir in it, perhaps, but 
that never lasts long : you won’t take the pains to please it ; 
and it soon leaves you for people who do. A witty thing comes 
into your head, and you say it, careless whom it may hit. You 
are bored by the vanity of other folks, and you show it, in- 
different where you may offend. You won’t conciliate big 
little people, and they in their spite set the big big people 
against you. So the snow-ball grows, and one day it gets 
large enough and hard enough to knock you out of Society 
altogether. People must make themselves agreeable to be 
agreeable to the world ; yes, and eat a good deal of dust, too ; 
that I concede. If they are very high and mighty by birth 
and all the rest of it, of course they can be as disagreeable as 
they choose, and make others eat the dust always. But if not, 
there is nothing for it but to toady. Believe me, nothing but 
to toady. Dear Lady Joan knows it. In her little way she 
succeeds thoroughly. It’s a very little way, I grant, — to be 
visited like other people, and go to bankers’ balls and clergy- 
men’s tea-fights, and stand well in ordinary society generally. 
That’s her ambition ! But see how she attains to what she 
wants, — -just by smiling on women she hates, and making 
believe that a twopenny-halfpenny chaplain can send her to 
heaven on earth I Oh, it all seems unutterably small to you. 
I know that,” she said, with some impatience, as Etoile irrev- 
erently laughed. “ You clever poetic people have a sort of 


FRIENDSHIP. 


169 


world of your own, a rock among the waves, like Chateau- 
briand’s Tomb. • But, after all, my dear creature. Society is 
not to be despised. It is pleasant. Pleasantness is the soft 
note of this generation, just as scientific assassination is the 
harsh note of it. The age is compounded of the two. Half 
of it is chloroform, the other half is dynamite. We are not 
brilliant, nor powerful, nor original; we shall never sparkle 
like the heau si^cle, nor leave heirs to immortality like the 
Cinque Cento, nor shape the world anew like the early Chris- 
tians, nor radiate with crystal clearness like the days of Pericles. 
But when we are not murderous, we are pleasant, pre-eminently 
pleasant ; we know how to gild things, we know how to gloss 
them, we know how to set chairs on wheels and put spring 
cushions in them : we are the Age of Anaesthetics. We have 
invented painless dentistry and patent bedsteads, we have dis- 
covered chloral and condonation, and though we have, to be 
sure, to bear uncomfortable things like the telephone, the Com- 
mune, and Wagner, still we snooze ourselves asleep, and decide 
that since we must all die so soon we will be as comfortable as 
we can whilst we are living. It is the doctrine of Horace, 
with the poetry left out. We are like Tennyson’s ‘ Lotus- 
eaters ‘ Let us alone ; what is there worth a row ?’ (Isn’t 
that the line ?) Now, you see, you people who will live on 
that rock in the midst of the sea, and fly across to us like 
eagles, only disturb us. That is the truth. You make us 
think, and Society dislikes thinking. You call things by 
their right names, and Society hates that, though Queen Bess 
didn’t mind it. You trumpet our own littleness in our ear, 
and we know it so well that we do not care to hear much 
about it. You shudder at sin, and we have all agreed that 
there is no such thing as sin, only mere differences of opinion, 
which, provided they don’t offend us, we have no business 
with : adultery is a liaison^ lying is gossip, debt is a momentary 
embarrassment, immorality is a little slip, and so forth ; and 
when we have arranged this pretty little dictionary of con- 
venient pseudonyms, it is not agreeable to have it sent flying by 
fierce, dreadful, old words, that are only fit for some book that 
nobody ever reads, like Milton or the Family Bible. We do 
not want to think. We do not want to hear. We do not 
care about anything. Only give us a good dinner and plenty 
of money, and let us outshine our neighbors. There is the 
H 15 


170 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Nineteenth Century Gospel. My dear, if Ecclesiastes him- 
self came over from that rock of yours, he vould preach in 
vain. You cannot convince people that don’t want to be con- 
vinced. We call ourselves Christians, — Heaven save the 
mark ! — but we are only the very lowest kind of pagans. We 
do not believe in anything, — except that nothing matters. 
Well, perhaps nothing does matter. Only one wonders why 
ever so many of us were all created, only just to find that 
out.” 

And Lady Cardiff, who sat and watched the world and her 
generation with the same contemptuous yet good-humored 
amusement that she watched children plunder a Christmas- 
tree or maidens romp in a cotillon, drew a long breath as she 
ended her harangue, lighted a fresh cigarette as she rolled home 
in the dusk, and sighed for the days of Louis Quatorze. 

“ Why don’t you talk, lo ?” the Lady Joan was saying, 
meanwhile, walking on under the trees past the kiosque. 

“ Mais, ma chere ! — there is such a noise from all those 
carriages.” 

“ Stuff ! There’s no more noise than any other day. Did 
you see Etoile?” 

“ I saw her.” 

“ With Lady Cardiff. Horrid woman. Lady Cardiff. I can’t 
think what you like in her. She is as insolent as ever she 
can be. I quite believe that story that Lord Cardiff left her 
because she horsewhipped him for driving another woman down 
to Richmond.” 

“ se pent” said loris, with a little shrug of his shoul- 
ders. 

“Unless it were worse” said Lady Joan. “Many people 
say it was woi-se. I do believe she’s said something to the 
Monmouthshires, for they have refused my dinner. After my 
giving ’em all those things, too ; and I wanted ’em to meet the 
Norwiches and the Fingals, because Fingal’s out of temper 
about that tabernacle of Mimo’s. Somebody’s been nasty and 
told him it is all modern bits glued together.” 

“ But of course !” said loris, with a certain contempt, as 
of one whose advice had been disregarded and was now 
proved right. 

“ Oh, of course ! you’re always so wise !” said his friend, 
with much irritation. “ Of course, when he’d had the money 


FRIENDSHIP, 


171 


in advance and there wasn’t a tabernacle to be found, nobody 
could do otherwise, and Fingal was delighted with the thing, 
delighted, until some busybody went and put him out of 
conceit of it. Mimo has most excellent taste ; nobody 
better.” 

“ Lord Fingal has better,” said loris, coldly : “ the taber- 
nacle will blemish his chapel.” 

“ You’ve never seen his chapel, and never will, unless I 
take you to have your soul converted to the true faith, as the 
Moira old fudges wanted me to do : do you remember ? If 
you didn’t like Mimo’s tabernacle, why didn’t you let us sell 
the one out of Fiordelisa ? That's genuine !” 

“ Ma chlre," said loris, blandly, “ you know well that there 
is nothing I ever refuse you. All I reserve to myself is the 
altar my fathers knelt at. It is foolish, no doubt, but it is a 
foolishness I cannot give up.” 

“ Oh no, you can be a mule when you like,” muttered 
Lady Joan, who had found him on matters that touched his 
ancestral creed immovable even under her menaces. loris 
was a man who clung to ancient faiths and ancient ways : he 
did not believe in them very devoutly, indeed, because he was 
a man of the world and of his time, but he would not have 
them disturbed. Spoil or embellish, ruin or restore, the rest 
of Fiordelisa as she might, he had will enough of his own to 
bar her progress at the chapel door. The Lady Joan, who 
looked longingly at its Della Robbias,- its Cellini candlesticks, 
its old oak screen, its old marble altar, and its chased silver 
chalices, felt herself defrauded of her rights. “ All these 
things growing mouldy for a set of peasants!” she would 
mutter, and in her mind’s-eye see them fittingly moved away 
to South Kensington, and did not despair even yet of one day 
so moving them. 

At that moment Mr. Silverly Bell joined them in their 
walk. “ My dear St. Paul 1” cried Lady Joan, enchanted : 
his baptismal name was Paul. 

Mr. Silverly Bell was flattered, and smiled. He had a 
soft sweet smile, — never softer, never sweeter, than when he 
was carrying little drops of poison about in little sweetmeats 
of pretty phrases : that was his occupation. No one could 
say Mr. Silverly Bell was otherwise than good-natured ; he 
never said an ill-natured thing : he only “ regi’etted,” only 


172 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ wished,” only “feared.” When a person’s character was so 
bad that as a savior of society he was obliged to drown it in 
the teapot, he always sighed as he did so, tenderly, and wore 
a quite crushed air, as of extreme pain. 

Lady Joan was very fond of him : she had not known him 
very long, indeed, but at a glance she had discovered the ex- 
treme usefulness of him, — smile, sigh, and all. He had started 
with a prejudice against her, but he had been vanquished ; 
she welcomed him so delightedly, invited him so persistently, 
praised him so ardently, that he could not but yield, and, with 
this handsome woman on his arm at the spinsters’ teas and 
the clergymen’s gatherings, could not but feel meekly flattered. 
In return, he placed himself — smile, sigh, and all — at her 
disposal, and was of great value. 

“ Silverly Bell assures me there’s nothing in it, — nothing 
in it. He must know : he’s always in her house,” said Mrs. 
Grundy, time and again, when, having received a momentary 
scare from the sight of Lady Joan rattling out at the gates 
with a gun between her knees, and the handsome profile of 
loris dark against the sun beside her, Mr. Silverly Bell reas- 
sured her seriously, and smoothed down her rufiied scruples 
with a few judicious words. 

“ What do I care for the old cats?” she would say, with 
a grin, twitching Pippo’s reins, and flecking her whip over her 
tossing mane. But she did care, care endlessly, care with all 
her heart and soul. People who do not care do not say so. 
The soldier who is not afraid never boasts that he fears no 
ball. 

The lawless gypsy-half of her sent her across country with 
her whip and her cigar, her gun and her lover, rattling through 
the dust at full gallop, and showing her white teeth at broad 
jests that she shouted above the din of the wheels. But the 
coward in her was none the less powerful ; and when the ponies 
were back in the stable, she would shake off the dust and don 
a full suit of decorum, and bear herself with cheerful counte- 
nance, and go through all the million and one ceremonials of 
commonplace existence with a zeal and a patience that demanded 
their reward and got it. 

A woman who ought to be out of society, but, nevertheless, 
is always in it, commands the genuine respect of both sexes. 
She pleases them, too ; for she neither oflends the stronger sex 


FRIENDSHIP. 


173 


by too much virtue, nor olFends the weaker sex by too much 
effrontery. Lady Joan lunching meekly off cold lamb and 
lettuce with a clergyman’s wife on a Sunday morning, and 
Lady Joan going joyously to champagne and caviare at the 
masquerade on a Sunday night, was an instance of that 
adaptability to circumstances which is the most popular of all 
qualities. 

Mr. Silverly Bell, and such as he, enabled her to go at 
once to the lamb and lettuce and to the champagne and caviare. 
She knew this, and petted Mr. Silverly Bell and his type 
accordingly. 

It may be opposed to all the graceful theories on the relations 
of the sexes, but it is true that the woman who seeks the ad- 
miration of the majority, and shows that it is agreeable to her, 
will almost always secure it. She will turn against her the 
highest order of men, indeed, but, as this is a very small 
minority, the loss will not be felt. In society, as in politics, 
the majority is the least intelligent but the most imposing 
section. 

Happily for herself, she was so constituted that she could 
enjoy netting a minnow as much as landing a sturgeon, and 
brought to her efforts at capture an infinite zest that was of 
itself assurance of success. She took so much trouble, she 
was so charmed with commonplaces, her smile beamed so 
radiantly, her hand pressed theirs so cordially, her manner 
was so accentuated with the strongest welcome and the most 
eager enjoyment of their companionship, that a man could 
hardly be otherwise than gratified with his own effect on her, 
and, when he left her presence, could not do less than defend 
the good manners and good taste of a lady so favorable to 
himself. 

The art of pleasing is more based on the art of seeming 
pleased than people think of, and she disarmed the prejudices 
of her enemies by the unaffected delight she appeared to take 
in themselves. You may think very ill of a woman, but 
after all you cannot speak very ill of her if she has assured 
you a hundred times that you are among her dearest friends. 

And if a very fastidious mind is displeased with flattery, 
very fastidious minds are riot general, and a taste for fliittery 
is. “ Be honey, and the flies will eat you,” says the old saw ; 
but, like most other proverbs, it will not admit of universal 

15 * 


174 


FRIENDSHIP. 


application. There is a way of being honey that is thoroughly 
successful and extremely popular and constitutes a kind of 
armor that is bomb-proof. 

“ Michael Angelo was a fool,” said Mr. Pratt, the English 
sculptor, who lived with Roman princes, and was called Phidias 
Pratt by artists in general, and took the derision seriously as 
a compliment — to Phidias, and would demonstrate to you that 
the Apollo of the Belvedere was nothing so very extraordinary 
after all. 

“ A sublime fool, but a fool !” said Phidias Pratt, shifting 
his scarlet fez on one side. “ Did all his work himself : only 
think of the waste of power ! Half his years spent in chip- 
ping, — lost in mere stonemason’s labor. Now, I keep sixty 
workmen ; I never touch the marble, — never touch it ! — and 
look what numbers of statues I can turn out in the year.” 

“And the ideas, Mr. Pratt?” said Etoile. “Do you hire 
them also, or do you do without them ?” 

“ The ideas ! the ideas !” echoed Phidias, with a stare ; 
and the good fellow walked off huffed in his velvet gown, 
among his marble children, who all gazed vacuously into space 
with scarcely more soul in any one of them than in the carven 
doll of a Swabian toy-maker. 

He had married, twenty years before, twenty thousand a 
year in the person of an alderman’s heiress, and his works 
were to be seen in law courts and public halls, gentlemen’s 
mansions and people’s parks. What did he want with ideas ? 
Nevertheless, he felt the allusion to such a thing was in very 
bad taste. 

The Lady Joan, who had brought Etoile to the studio, 
grinned as she herself fell into ecstasies over a Desolation, the 
embroideries of whose tunic she declared she felt she must 
pick off with a pair of scissors, the marble was so exactly like 
thread. 

“ How could you inquire for such ‘ outsiders’ as ideas ?” 
she murmured to Etoile. “ Of course he hires his ideas : 
clever young Italians sell heaps of ideas for a hundred francs. 
All that’s dear old Phid’s own in his sculptures is his name 
on the pedestals.” 

“ Poor Michael Angelo !” 

The Lady Joan laughed. 

“ Well, I don’t think you need put yourself out for him : 


FRIENDSHIP. 


• 175 


he’s pretty safe, and I don’t think Phid here will go down to 
posterity with him. But Phid will hate you, you know, for- 
ever. Why don’t you tell him that Venus at the Bath is 
beautiful ?” 

“ A bathing woman, that must have been modelled at Trou- 
ville ? With a hip out of joint, too : look !” 

“ Phid gives capital parties, and he’s ‘ coining’ every day,” 
said Lady Joan, dryly. “ And his wife has the longest and 
nastiest tongue in Europe.” 

And she swam after the sulking Phidias, and told him that 
his Sabrina was the noblest work of the century. Sabrina 
was robed from head to foot : Mr. Phidias Pratt thought the 
nude barbarous ; he held, too, that it was very easy : “ only 
study anatomy, and there you were.” 

“ A very intelligent woman, that wife of Challoner’s,” said 
the good Phidias to his own wife, a few hours later. “ If I 
were you, I’d call on her: it isn’t worth while to be too starchy : 
of course she larks about with loris, and all that kind of thing ; 
but it’s no business of ours if the husband like it; and she 
tells me Lord Hebrides is her cousin. The Hebrides are 
here this winter. I’d leave a bit of pasteboard, if I were 
you.’’ 

His wife, who hitherto had always insisted that the Casa 
Challoner was too flagrant to be entered, because she herself 
came from Clapham and had severe notions, allowed herself to 
be pemuaded against her conscience, and left the bit of paste- 
board, and a few days later a larger piece inscribed, “ Mrs. 
Pratt. At Home. Tuesdays,” — with a very small “ music” 
hiding itself in the corner. 

Lady Joan gave a grimace of triumph before the big card. 
Mrs. Pratt’s musical Tuesdays were among the choicest gather- 
ings of the season : all the embassies went there, and hitherto 
Lady Joan had languished in vain for an entrance. 

Of course a similar big card was delivered at the house of 
loris. Society, provided only you will wash your cup and 
platter, will always oblige you in these little things. 

Mrs. Pratt had been six years bringing her Clapham con- 
science into recognition of the Casa Challoner; but, having 
brought her conscience round at last, she brought it round 
with a handsome sweep, and knew the polite ways of society 
too much not to follow them, and sent the big card to loris, so 


176 


FRIENDSHIP. 


that he might enter her presence with the Lady Joan, and be 
at hand for the Lady Joan’s fan on the Lady Joan’s wish to 
walk about the rooms, or the Lady Joan’s carriage when the 
party was over. Mrs. Phidias Pratt knew that as a leader of 
society she must be amiable in such matters. 

So did Lady Joan gain her point, by merely pretending to 
want her scissors to pick olF the embroideries of a marble 
Desolation, and by saying that a Sabrina surpassed Praxiteles 
and Donatello. 

Who should say she was not a cleverer woman than Etoile ? 

Certainly Mrs. Pratt left cards little and big on Etoile, as 
she would have done on Phryne or Mephistopheles, had she 
met either of them at Princess Vera’s; but Mr. Pratt said to 
his wife that he was sure there would be something queer 
about her somewhere which would come out some day, and 
Mrs. Pratt pursed her mouth to her friend : “ Y — e — es. 

We do receive her. We met her at Princess Vera’s. But, 
who was she ? That is what I never can learn.” 

“ Who was she ?'' said Mrs. Pratt, with sepulchral whisper 
and solemn stare, and had a way of saying it, and of vaguely 
implying a great deal by the way she said it, for which Lady 
Joan could have kissed her, “detestable old woman,” with 
her dukes and duchesses and rubbish, though the Lady Joan 
had always considered her to be. For the Lady Joan did not 
permit other people to air dukes and duchesses ; as for herself, 
dukes and duchesses were all her cousins, and came in handy 
when she wanted to impress the small fry of society ; that was 
different ; when you are born a Perth-Douglas, and want to sell 
a teacup or a triptych, you must employ the advantage that 
Nature has given you. 

But she was very often so out of temper with herself that 
neither dukes nor duchesses, teacups nor triptychs, could recon- 
cile her to life. She knew very well that when she had been pre- 
sented at seventeen, handsome, black browed, and Spanish-look- 
ing, there had been no reason in life why she should not have 
become an English duchess in her own person. By temper 
she was ambitious, by nature she longed for place and power ; 
she knew very well that her life was a coup manque ; and now 
and then some irritated pride at the smallness of her aims and 
the pigmy proportions of her results would wake in her, and 
make her acrid and disappointed and enraged with her past and 


FRIENDSHIP. 177 

her present. There were times when she realized that her life 
was, after all, obscure and little and ignoble. 

Sometimes it made her in such a rage with herself that she 
shook her fist at the image of her black brows in her mirror. 
For she was shrewd enough, and — in her own odd way — proud 
enough, to hate herself heartily at times for all the dust she 
ate, and all the honey she prepared for the eating of Society. 
And still more she hated those who had sight enough to see the 
dust on her mouth, and the honey in her hands, and among 
them she instinctively numbered Etoile. 

She began to detest Etoile with that vehement and concen- 
trated dislike which is only the stronger because it cannot ex- 
plain itself or put any clear name to its origin. 

Something in the glance of Etoile stung her conscience ; 
something in her smile made her pride wince : she was always 
fancying that Etoile was thinking of all Voightel had told her 
of those days when the champagne had been in the ice-pails on 
the house-tops in Damascus. Voightel had told her nothing, 
but the L^dy Joan would never have credited that. Somehow, 
too, before Etoile’s life — meditative, poetic, studious, always 
aloof from the world even when in the world — her own life 
seemed common and bustling and base and ridiculous. At the 
bottom of her soul lay a contempt for herself, a bitter and 
restless contempt : it stirred in her and stung her in this 
stranger’s presence, — and she hated her. 


CHAPTER XV. 

“ Why don’t people like Etoile ?” said Lady Cardiff. 

“ Don’t they like her ?” said a Russian baroness. “ I do.” 

“ You do, my dear, I do, a hundred clever people do, but 
not the majority !” 

“ I will tell you why,” said Princess Vera, who was in her 
own house, and to whom these ladies had come as an amateur 
deputation about a great charity ball at the Capitol. 

“ Yes. Well ?” said Lady Cardiff, in expectation of a tit- 
bit of news. 

“ She likes to see the sun rise,” said Princess Vera. 

II* 


178 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ What ? The sun rise in winter !” 

“In winter and summer. Unnatural, isn’t it?” said 
Princess Vera, lifting her lovely head from an old miniature 
she was copying. “ It is those unnatural tastes that we find 
unpleasant. The traditional lady who answered naively that 
she did not care for innocent pleasures was the one candid 
person of all womanhood, depend on it, and represented a sen- 
timent more general than we like to acknowledge. A woman 
who does like innocent pleasures is to us just what a writer 
who won’t take money for his books, or a painter who won’t 
sell his pictures, is to all other writers and all other painters. 
Nothing is so objectionable in anybody as to be above every- 
body else’s tastes and necessities. When we come from our 
balls feeling ugly and untidy and ennuydes, and see her just 
coming out of the door beginning the day, we feel to dislike 
her. It is all the sunrise. Nothing else.” 

People laughed. Princess Vera, who was always lovely, 
and never ennuyee, and cared for sunrises herself, could aflford 
to say such things. 

Mrs. Henry V. Clams, who was present, felt angry, though 
she never dared to open her lips before Princess Vera. 

“ Of course one aren’t as neat and spry cornin’ out as goin’ 
in, and after the cotillon how should we be? but there’s no 
call for her to say so,” she thought, feeling personally aggrieved, 
and wondering if Princess Vera had seen her curl drop off into 
the soup, as it had done at the J apanese Embassy supper on 
the previous night. 

Princess Vera was quite right: Society was naturally sus- 
picious of such a queer taste for sunrises. 

Society could never understand it. Why should anybody 
who wasn’t obliged go out early? All the pretty fashionable 
women who waltzed themselves half out of their sleeveless 
bodices till sunrise dawned on them drinking hot soup and 
champagne, and then slept serenely with chloral’s benign aid 
till it was time to have their complexions “ done up,” never 
could understand or forgive a woman who walked, drove, or 
rode in solitude while the dew was still fresh. 

For some years the world that talked about her had thought 
Etoile went out for mysterious intrigues, which intention would 
have redeemed the unnatural action and made it more natural ; 
but, being at length after several seasons compelled to conclude 


FRIENDSHIP. 179 

that this explanation was impossible, the eccentricity of the 
habit could be only annoying. 

That she went for mere air, mere exercise, and the charm 
that lies in the freshness and silence of the early day, was a 
thing far too simple to be grasped by the astute intelligence 
of an experienced Society. 

The simplicity of the artist is always the stumbling-block 
of the artist with the world. 

One early morning, following this habit, she was wandering 
alone with her dog under the woods of the Pamphili Doria, 
where she had especial permission to drive at her pleasure. In 
the breezy uplands of that lovely place she rambled ankle-deep 
in violets, lost in thought, the dreamy scholarly fanciful thought 
which Rome begets in any contemplative mind ; suddenly her 
thoughts were scattered by the excitement and apparent sorrow 
of Tsar, who ran to and fro, whining and pawing at some 
object on the grass under the oak-trees. On going nearer to 
the dog, she found outstretched there a woman who had 
fainted and was lying insensible. 

She was young and handsome, though her face had the 
gaunt gray leanness of long hunger, and her bones seemed 
almost starting through the skin. When the woman came to 
herself, she moaned for her child, refusing to be comforted, 
and begging to be taken home. “ Home” was a miserable 
garret, in a dark and loathsome lane of crowded hovels. 

Etoile had her taken there, and followed her. 

In the garret was a baby of two years ; he was rosy and 
well ; the mother had starved herself to give him the little 
food she could get. By little and little she told her story, a 
very trite one : she was a Hungarian, a ballet-dancer, engaged 
at fifteen years of age to follow a wandering Viennese troop, 
and, falling ill, left behind them unpaid ; for the enterprise 
had not succeeded. In her poverty and beauty a young French 
painter had found her and loved her : she had been happy for 
six months. Then her lover had deserted her, gone to his own 
country, promising to return ; he had written once or twice, 
but never now for two years. She had no relatives and no 
friends. Dance any more she could not, for her ankle had 
been broken in a stage-trap, and, though well again, had been 
ill set and was stiff. Friendless, sick, and wretched, she had 
dropped from one depth to another depth, lower and lower, but 


180 


FRIENDSHIP. 


keeping herself honest that the boy might not blush for her 
in his manhood. 

She had gone into the Pamphili woods to gather violets to 
sell, and had fainted as she had stooped to the first flower. 
It was one of those short sad stories which lie thick and com- 
mon as dust under the roofs of great cities. Death comes 
and brushes such dust away; and it gathers again by the 
morrow. 

Etoile, returning to see her later in the day, and welcomed 
in the wretched attic with touching gratitude, found that the 
poor creature’s one desire was to get some means of mainten- 
ance for herself and the child in Rome. She could not bear 
to leave the place where her love’s short joys had been known, 
and where her lover, she always hoped, might one day or 
other return. 

She did not know what to do, but was willing to do any- 
thing “ that would not make the child ashamed.” The sculp- 
tors would have paid her to let them model her form, which 
was symmetrically beautiful ; but better death, even for the 
boy, than that, she thought. She clung with absolute fidelity 
to her lover’s memory. 

The hive of wretched houses in which she dwelt was in 
the heart of Rome, and almost touched the back of the Casa 
Challoner. When, with an aching heart, she left the garret, 
the little child stretching his arms out after her, and tlie 
mother blessing her and the dog too for rescue from the grave, 
it was twilight in the short wintry day, and the lamp, lighted 
before the doorway of the Temple of all the Virtues, caught 
her sight as it glanced through the gloom. 

“ Perhaps she could help me to help her,” thought Etoile. 
She vaguely doubted in all things the woman who Voightel 
had said would be to her the Prose of Rome, yet the energy 
and promptitude of a character utterly opposite to her own as 
vaguely impressed her by its very unlikeness to herself The 
Hungarian girl, in her wretchedness, was only divided by a 
few yards from the cosy mirthful chambers of the Casa Chal- 
loner. To speak of her might perhaps secure her a friend 
there. 

It was a Wednesday, and several of the heavy landaus, that 
yearly bear to and fro their freight of rich foreign visitors 
about the streets of Rome, were standing before the house. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


181 


Etoile descended from her own carriage, and remembered that 
she ought weeks before to have attended one of these solemn 
rites. 

The house looked curiously changed. It made her think 
of Sganarelle drawing a long face to feel the patient’s pulse. 

There was no scent in the Turkish room save from a foun- 
tain of eau de Cologne ; there was a tea-urn in the Turkish 
room solemn as a high altar ; there were crowds entirely com- 
posed of ladies, and serried ranks of dowagers and spinsters 
bolt upright on the Turkish divans. There was a murmur 
of small talk like the unending murmur of the sea ; the Bishop 
of Melita and a Dean of St. Edmund’s conversed together in 
the centre of the chamber ; Mr. Challoner had become “ dear 
Bobert,” and was handing bread-and-butter ; and amidst it all 
stood the Lady Joan, with a little ruff round her throat, and 
a gray gown, who was asking after a baby’s health with eager 
solicitude, and standing with her little girl’s curls pressed 
tenderly to her side, herself smiling sweetly in the face of 
Mrs. Grundy, as typified at that moment by Lady George 
Scrope-Stair and that very proper little person, Mrs. Mac- 
scrip. 

Mrs. Grundy was in great force, indeed, in all her types 
there, and the Lady Joan, with her hand on her child’s neck, 
was saying, apologetically, — 

“ Well, you know, I don’t like it, and that’s the truth. 
Of course there are unpleasant sorts of stories, and Mr. Chal- 
loner doesn’t approve my being much With her. But, you 
know, I’m always good-natured, and my father is such a dear 
blind goose ” 

“ The Comtesse d’Avesnes !” shouted her servant between 
the silk curtains of her drawing-room doorway. 

The serried battalions of Mrs. Grundy’s forces fell asunder 
with a shock, and some dropped their biscuits, and one even 
dropped her cup. The Lady Joan, however, who never 
dropped anything except an inconvenient memory or an unre- 
munerative acquaintance, rushed forward with cordial smile 
and outstretched hands. 

“ Too good of you ! What a pleasure! You, who despise 
tea-fights, too ! Do come to the fire. Effie, go and fetch the 
cream.” 

Little Effie, bringing the cream, looked softly at Etoile, 
16 


182 


FRIENDSHIP. 


who had been kind to her, and timidly stroked the silver-fox 
furs of her dress. 

“ I like you,” said the child, in a nervous little voice. 
“ Why did mamma say ?” 

“ Effie, hand the cake to Lady George,” said Mr. Challoner, 
who was standing on guard by the hearth-rug, having just 
safely left the bishop and the dean cordially discussing the 
state of the Colonial Church. The child, frightened, slid 
timidly away, and it never occurred to Etoile that the words 
which she had partially overheard on her entrance could by 
any chance whatever have referred to herself. 

The serried ranks of Mrs. Grundy drew away from the fire, 
and, as around a safe and holy sanctuary, closed round the 
tea-table, where the Scrope-Stair sisters, in bonnetless intimacy, 
were presiding over the urn. 

“Dear Lady Joan is too good-natured,” sighed Mrs. Grundy, 
sotto voce, and the Scrope-Stair sisters murmured back, — 

“ Oh, yes, you know ; it is her independence and nobleness. 
She never vdll believe in the possibility of evil.” 

Mrs. Grundy shook her head, and, glancing towards the 
fire, wondered what the cost of the silver-fox furs had been. 
Why could questionable characters always dress so well ? 
Mrs. Grundy does not always dress well. 

Lady Cardiff nodded from her corner by the hearth, where 
she had ensconced herself with her eye-glass, and motioned 
Etoile to a seat beside her. 

“ How do, my dear Comtesse? Cold day, isn’t it? What 
a charming gown ! And those niello buttons too, — delicious ! 
It’s quite amusing here : only one’s always afraid she’ll come 
out with something for one to buy. If it wasn’t for that ap- 
prehension it would really be delicious to see her butter all 
those bores and do the proper for Mrs. Grundy. I’ve said I’d 
the toothache, and kept quiet just to watch her. It’s great 
fun. How does she square it with all her little games ? But 
the little games are only the boldness of innocence. So Mimo 
says. He must know.” 

Lady Cardiff put up her eye-glass to look at Mrs. Henry 
V. Clams’s Bretonne toilette (the entire costume of a fisher- 
girl, correctly copied, in feuille-morte velvet and navy-blue 
satin, with a merveilleuse bonnet to crown it appropriately), 
and Lady Cardiff said aloud for the benefit of neighbors that 


FRIENDSHIP. 


183 


His Holiness was very ill, the old trouble in the legs, and then, 
sinking her voice, continued, — 

“ In Spain, you know, my dear, when a lovely woman has 
had an adventure her friends say she has eaten a lily. That’s 
just what her friends say. She munches her leeks, and they 
swear they’re lilies. Happy creature ! All comes of a wooden 
husband, as I told you the other day, and her admirable faculty 
of boring herself to death. She will hear me? Nonsense; 
she is screaming into Lady George Scrope’s ear-trumpet. If 
she did hear, she’d only ask me to dinner and sell me a magot. 
That’s her way of revenging herself. She’s been dying to be 
acquainted with the Monmouthshires for four winters, but 
they never would let her be introduced to them. (You know 
whom I mean , — the Monmouthshires : she’s the Duke of 
Brecon’s sister.) Well, when I was with them one day last 
week, in comes my Lady Joan, bold as brass, and with her 
pockets full of all the sweepings of her hric-d-hrac shops, and 
rosaries of olives, that she gathered herself upon Olivet, — all 
these as offerings to Anne Monmouthshire, who is perfectly 
mad on the subject of a lottery for the blind English in Rome. 
(I believe there are six of them blind, or some such number.) 
And all these sweepings and olives were for that lottery. The 
bait took ; yes, the bait took. Anne Monmouthshire, who 
always loathed her, has returned her card, and has certainly 
invited her to a musical party next week. Now, you, instead 
of doing a thing like that, only find out sick old folks and do 
good to them, and let nobody be the wiser. 

“ There ! there !” said Lady Cardiff, vivaciously, interrupt- 
ing herself, as a haughty-looking dowager, with a very aquiline 
nose, and very fine sables, sailed into the room. “ Didn’t I 
tell you so? Just look at her. There’s Anne Monmouth- 
shire actually come on her day ! Watch her now! Watch 
her I What eagerness, what cordiality, what ecstasy ! Dear 
me, how very funny it is that anybody born a Pcrth-Douglas 
should be such a snob 1 She pined four whole winters to get 
the Monmouthshires here, and now she’s done it, just by those 
shop-sweepings and olives. Really she ought to have been a 
greater creature than she is 1 Oh, I see you despise all these 
things. You are leagues above such considerations. You are 
governed by your sympathies and your antipathies. You seek 
or shun other folks by no better rule than their merit or 


184 


FRIENDSHIP. 


demerit. What can be more indiscreet? You like people 
who can be of no manner of service to you, and dislike all 
sorts of great personages. Pardon me, but that is not how 
Society is carried on. Society is an aggregate of personal 
enemies : all women are all women’s enemies, and most women 
are most men’s enemies, too, if men did but know it, — which 
they don’t ; but hostility should never interfere with prudence. 
A grain of sand may blind a Samson, or a Sappho : that is 
the figure that should always loom large before any of us. 
Don’t provoke the sand with a whirlwind : take a watering- 
pot. That is where our admirable Lady Joan is pre-eminent. 
To look at her, she should raise the whirlwind : with an 
Oriental profile and a mastilF s jaw, one would expect a whirl- 
wind from her. Not a bit of it ; she has a nice green water- 
ing-pot, like a true British horticulturist, and she smooths 
her sand diligently with a silver shower from the parish pump. 
The whirlwind does the world good : it clears the mist, it 
sweeps away the pestilence, it bears the eagles as the sea her 
ships, and drives the clouds before it. Oh, yes, and it’s very 
nice in epic poetry. But the watering-pot is a much meeker 
domestic servant, and a much more popular instrument. If 
you would use the watering-pot, my dear, you would never 
get the dust in your eyes.” 

Wherewith Lady Cardiff rose and swam away majestically 
to her friend Anne Monmouthshire, and said, very cruelly, — 

“ Didn’t know you knew Lady Joan, my love ! Delighted 
to meet you so unexpectedly. Have you come to get any 
more rosaries ? Gathered the olives yourself, dear Lady Joan, 
didn’t you, and on Olivet? Dear me, how charming! just 
like Noah’s dove. Wasn’t it Noah’s dove?” 

Meanwhile Mrs. Henry V. Clams approached Etoile, who 
always filled her with that uncomfortable sensation which 
Burns embodies as the idea that a “ chiefs amang us takin’ 
notes,” and, engaging her timidly in conversation, invited her 
to dinner, — a very great dinner to be given in twelve days 
from that time. 

Etoile declined, on the plea that she had come for health, 
and went out very little. Mrs. Henry V. Clams suddenly 
felt that the Bretonne costume was loud, and the merveilleuse 
bonnet incongruous. “ She’s real nasty,” thought that good- 
natured lady. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


185 


At that moment there entered a person very unlike the 
Bishop of Melita and the Dean of St. Edmund’s, — a graceful 
and distinguished-looking person, with a charming smile and 
a perfect bow. 

Lady CardilF put up her eye-glass. 

“ Dear me ! There’s loris !” she said to her friend Anne 
Monmouthshire, whom she had cruelly possessed herself of, 
and drawn away near the door. “Dear me! Husbands 
usually shirk these ‘ days,’ but he and Mr. Challoner are 
really most exemplary. What do I mean? Oh, I don’t 
mean anything, of course, my dear. Nice-looking man, isn’t 
he? Such race about him. Somehow he doesn’t go well 
with the tea-urn, do you think? and the bishop? You are 
quite delighted with her ? To be sure : why shouldn’t you 
be? I’m sure she tries hard to please you, and she never 
did anything in the East, you know, but gather those olives ; 
never anything 1 Such a pretty idea, too, Olives from Olivet 1” 

Meanwhile, as loris entered, the brow of his hostess grew 
black as night. “ You’re an hour too early ; how could 
you be such a fool ?” she muttered, roughly. “ You ought 
always to let ’em all be gone : I’ve told you so fifty hundred 
times.” 

He murmured penitent apologies, greeted the saints around 
the tea-urn gayly and gracefully, and crossed to the sinner in 
the silver furs. “ I saw your liveries at the door, so I ven- 
tured to enter,” he murmured to Etoile. Mr. Challoner shifted 
his eye-glass with a grim smile, and, vacating his post by the 
fire, asked Mrs. Grundy if the Chemnitz scandal were not a 
terrible blow to Society. Mr. Challoner always spoke of So- 
ciety with peculiar tenderness and respect, as if it were his 
elder brother. 

The Baroness Chemnitz, who had dealt this blow, was a 
beautiful young. Koman, with a head as perfect as a narcissus, 
and a body as graceful as its stem. She had been wedded by 
a ruined family to a great German capitalist at eighteen. She 
had decorated his wonderful Louis Quinze houses and Renais- 
sance hotels for some five or six seasons. She had seen all 
the world dance in her gorgeous rooms until ten in the morn- 
ing in Paris, Berlin, and Rome. Then a great love had en- 
tered into her, — a whirlwind of passion that transformed the 
pale, pensive narcissus into a purple passiflora with a heart of 


186 


FRIENDSHIP. 


fire. She fell, but she fell grandly. She erred, but she never 
swerved from her punishment. She faced the wrath of her 
husband, the fury of her family, the rage of the world. She 
confessed herself guilty, and claimed her separation, and left 
all the gold and the glories of her place, and went out to face 
solitude, — for her lover even turned against her ; lovers, like 
Society, dislike a storm, and blame a hesitation to deceive. 
The husband had to be held back by main force from her de- 
struction ; she hurled her hatred of him in his teeth, and 
shook herself free from the trammels of his riches, and went 
down into the dust of obscurity. What could an outraged 
Society do ? — such a woman as this was unnatural. To old 
Greek times perhaps she might belong, but born under the 
Second Empire of France, surely she should have known some 
better way than this. 

She was in love, of course, — women always were, — but then 
to leave such luxury for love 1 

What depravity 1 sighed Society. Such a ball as her last 
was, — diamond rings and sapphire lockets given away like 
pebbles in the cotillon, and twenty thousand francs spent in 
forced strawberries alone ! How stupid, when, with a little 
management, nothing need have been known, you know ! — 
her bedroom hung with white satin embroidered with wreaths 
of roses ; her footmen to be counted by the score ; her lovers 
like the dreams of Aladdin ; and to leave all that, when with 
a little tact ! — was there ever such unheard-of madness ? — to 
make an abominable eclat^ when with only a grain of sense 
no one need have suspected anything ! — to lose a fortune 
counted by trillions, because she could not smile in her lord’s 
eyes, and lie a little gracefully and manage things quite quietly, 
as good-breeding teaches every one ! What insuperable idiocy ! 
— what inconceivable baseness 1 Did she not know better her 
mere duty to Society ? 

What did Society care for the woman’s agony, for her long 
temptation, for her piteous feebleness, for the mute misery 
with which she had played her part in the gorgeous pageant of 
her life, for the passionate sickness for one voice, one glance, 
one touch,/which had made her cast away all the pomp and 
powers of her place and fling herself into the dust for love 
alone ? 

What did they know or care ? They only saw a fool who 


FRIENDSHIP. 


187 


forfeited pride and pleasure and possession ; who left wealth 
and ease and the delights of boundless extravagance behind 
her as so much dross ; who could not lie, who would not be 
bribed, who would not be content with treachery and vice, 
but craved for liberty, and stooped to truth ! Society was 
outraged. 

If her precedent were followed, what balls would there be 
to go to? A husband who leaped like a lion to avenge his 
own dishonor, and a wife who shook off millions like dust 
from her unfaltering feet 1 Society was aghast : nothing 
frightens it like passion. For what does Passion care to 
amuse Society ? 

Society with one voice proclaimed Geltrude Chemnitz the 
vilest of her sex, and now, around the Lady Joan’s tea-table, 
agreed with Mr. Challoner that in these flagrant cases Society 
could not be too severe. Society, which invited Lady Joan 
and loris to the same entertainments ; Society, which smiled 
and sniggered with vile beneficence on a million illicit unions; 
Society, which had invented and patronized those blasphemies 
of “ friendship” and fervent parodies of “ purity Society, 
which pressed the wife’s wedded hand warm from her lover’s 
lips, so long as the husband presided blandly at the desecration 
of his hearth ; Society, which smiled good-humoredly on the 
“ little weaknesses” of post-nuptial loves so long as the sup- 
planted lord had neither modesty enough to feel his shame, 
nor virility enough to take his vengeance ; Society, which 
crowned the adulteress, and welcomed her so long as she kept 
a lie upon her mouth and had a bold front lifted to the gaze 
of men ; Society, which only when the man was roused as 
man, and the woman could blush as woman, saw “ any harm 
whatever,” and only when the doors were shut, the tables feast- 
less, and the world forgotten in woe, found out that sin was 
after all an ugly thing, and faithless wives were wantons. 

“ It is such a grievous thing when a woman forgets herself 1” 
said the Lady Joan, who had danced at the last monster ball 
in the Louis Quinze rooms, and ordered lo to bring her her 
chicken and champagne in tones that a kindly duchess would 
barely use to a steward s room-boy. 

She herself never forgot herself; she only forgot other 
people, — when they were of no use to her, — which does not 
matter at all. 


188 


FRIENDSHIP. 


What a fool the beautiful wife of Baron Chemnitz looked 
to her ! — to have only one lover in all your life, and let every- 
body know it, and leave white satin bedrooms and Louis Quinze 
dining-rooms, diamonds as big as marbles, and horses from the 
imperial haras, and all the rest of it, with a horrible rupture 
and uproar, so that all Europe heard of the crime ! 

It made Lady Joan quite ferocious to think what chances 
other women had and what dire mess and misuse they made 
of them. Only see what she did, — with little rooms like 
bandboxes, and no money to speak of, and never a Louis 
Quinze mirror in the house at all, unless it were bought to be 
sold on the morrow. 

She felt more respect than ever for herself, and felt that 
there was some use, after all, in a Mr. Challoner, just as there 
is, no doubt, in sea-anemones and house-flies, and other inferior 
creations, whose existence a superior humanity is apt thought- 
lessly to resent as useless and insignificantly superfluous, and 
occasionally prominently disagreeable. 

“ My ! It’s a caution, aren’t it !” said Mrs. Henry V. 
Clams, thoughtlessly, biting a piece out of a bit of Madeira 
cake. 

Lady Joan looked severe as Diana Nemorensis. A caution ! 
Who wanted “a caution” in good society? Did not Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams know that she was eating cake in the Temple 
of all the Virtues? 

“ It is disgusting, — perfectly disgusting,” she said, with 
severity. “ And to think we all went to her only last week ! 
Really, it is quite horrible, isn’t it? It makes one almost 
feel ashamed oneself” 

“ I don’t see no call to do that,” said Mrs. Henry V. Clams, 
reddening a little, for she had brought a sort of conscience 
out of the land of wooden nutmegs, and never could attain 
the sublime audacity of the Lady Joan’s panoply of perfection. 
“ I don’t see no call to do that. We aren’t no kith or kin to 
her, poor soul. Oh, my ! she’ll miss it fine, I reckon : do you 
mind that riviere Chemnitz gave her New Year’s Day ? Pearls 
as big as plovers’ eggs: weren’t they, now? She must be 
downright vicious.” 

“ Innate depravity !” said the Lady Joan. “Well, she’ll 
starve now, thank goodness. She hasn’t a penny of her own, 
you know.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


189 


And the ladies present, who had all danced, and drunk, and 
borne olf the costly cotillon toys from the Chemnitz balls 
throughout four Carnivals, agreed that she ought to starve ; 
all except Mrs. Henry V. Clams, who was too good-natured, 
and whose conscience was pricking her. 

The Prince loris turned round in the low chair where he 
sat by the hearth beside Etoile, and murmured a word in favor 
of his lovely countrywoman. 

“ The blame is hardly Geltrude’s,” he said, gently. “ I 
knew her from her infancy : she was of the sweetest nature ; 
but her people forced her into a marriage that she loathed ; 
she was frank and fearless, and our women are not cold, mes- 
dames : love to them ” 

“ Hold your tongue, lo ! This is not the place to talk in 
such a way,” said Lady Joan, sharply, with a heavy frown. 
“ There is no excuse for Madame Chemnitz, — not the slightest. 
She should have done her duty. It was certainly gilded 
enough to make it easy !” 

loris was silent, and, turning back again to the fire, resumed 
his conversation with Etoile. When your lady-love arrays 
herself in ruffs and farthingale of social virtue, there is ob- 
viously nothing to do but to be silent. You cannot quarrel 
with her for having managed so well that whilst she smiles 
upon you she yet makes the world smile on her : it would be 
both impolite and ungrateful. 

“ 1 am pained for Chemnitz, — very pained. What can 
riches compensate to a man for dishonor ?” said Mr. Challoner, 
sternly gazing at the teapot. The assembled ladies murmured 
applause to so beautiful if hackneyed a sentiment. 

“ Lord ! what a liar that man is !” thought Mrs. Henry V. 
Clams, and went to her carriage to take up Fontebranda at 
the club. 

Fontebranda never asked her to make Mr. Henry V. Clams 
lie in that manner : Fontebranda only said to her, “ Get a 
great cook ; give three big balls a winter, and drive English 
horses : you need never consider Society then, it will never 
find fault with you, ma tr&s-cliere'^ 

She did not (juite understand, but she obeyed ; and Society 
never did. Society says to the members of it as the Spanish 
monk to the tree that he pruned, and that cried out under his 
hook, — 


190 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ It is not beauty that is wanted of you, nor shade, but 
olives.” 

JMoral loveliness or mental depth, charm of feeling or noble- 
ness of instinct, beauty or shade, it does not ask for ; but it 
does ask for olives, — olives that shall round off its dessert, 
and flavor its dishes, and tickle its sated palate, — olives that 
it shall pick up without trouble, and never be asked to pay 
for : these are what it likes. 

Now, it is precisely in olives that the woman who has one 
foot in Society and one foot out of it will be profuse. 

She must please, or perish. 

She must content, or how will she be countenanced ? 

The very perilousness of her position renders her solicitous 
to attract and to appease. 

Society follows a natural selfishness in its condonation of 
her ; she is afraid of it, therefore she must bend all her efforts 
to be agreeable to it ; it can reject her at any given moment, 
so that her court of it must be continual and expansive. No 
woman will take so much pains, give so much entertainment, 
be so willing to conciliate, be so lavish in hospitality, be so 
elastic in willingness, as the woman who adores Society and 
knows that any black Saturday it may turn on her with a 
bundle of rods and a peremptory dismissal. 

Between her and Society there is a tacit bond. 

“ Amuse me, and I will receive you.” 

“ Beceive me, and I will amuse you.” 

Meanwhile Lady Joan dismissed, one by one, the whole 
battalion of Mrs. Grundy’s forces, and the lighter squadrons 
of airy ladies who had carried off the gold toys from the 
Chemnitz cotillons, and heard the carriages of the deans, and 
the dowagers, and the bankers’ wives, and the more modest 
cabs of the minor acquaintances, roll away towards the Corso 
in the dusk. The Scrope-Stairs bonneted and cloaked them- 
selves, and also prepared to depart. 

“ They are excellent persons,” loris had said confidentially 
of them to Etoile, that day in the corner by the fire : “ J/d/t ! 
mi seccano ! They are the sort of women we put in con- 
vents in our country. It is terrible that the English have 
nowhere to put their unmarriageable women, but can only let 
them overrun other lands, like flocks of goats, stray and 
unhappy.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


191 


“ You are very ungrateful : they adore you, all these 
sisters.” 

“ Oh ! C'est le pire defaut /” had rejoined loris, with his 
light laugh. 

But the Scrope-Stairs sisters, assisting at the tea-table, had 
heard nothing of this, and little divined what he had been 
saying as he had sat in the corner by the fire, in the low chair 
that Lady Cardiff had vacated. 

“ lo,” said Lady Joan, as the sisters enabraced her in adieu, 
and with that glitter of wrath in her eyes which loris knew 
but too well, “ the girls can’t go by themselves, and I can’t 
spare anybody. See them home, will you ? Get back by 
seven : Bonsoulet will be here, you know, and Victor.” 

loris glanced at Etoile, hesitated, sighed, and offered his 
escort to the sisters. 

“ They might go from the Campidoglio to Soracte : no one 
would stop them,” he thought to himself ; but courtesy was 
his nature, and obedience to his tyrant was second nature. 

“ He’d have gone home with her if I hadn’t sent him off,” 
thought the Lady Joan, wondering why Etoile still remained 
in the low chair by the fire. 

“ I lingered behind your other visitors because I want your 
advice, if you will give it me,” said Etoile, as though answering 
her thoughts, as the door closed upon loris, and Mr. Challoner 
vanished into his own den. 

She responded eagerly, all attention in an instant, remem- 
bering that Etoile had bought a good deal of brocade. 

“ Delighted ! Anything I can do, — only tell me. What 
is it ?” 

To her view, “helping people” always meant advising them 
to buy hric-a-hrac ; and she heartily resolved that if it meant 
furniture, china, or stuffs, she must send Mimo a hint to get 
out all the best things he had, and to mind that all the marks 
and the millesimcs were correct. 

Etoile sat down beside Lady Joan, and told her the story 
of the dancing-girl who was starving behind the wall of 
her house. 

“ The little boy is lovely,” she said, when she had ended 
the sad little history ; “ and the woman, I am sure, would 
interest you if you saw her. She would die, and even let the 
child die, sooner than be faithless to her faithless lover.” 


192 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Lady Joan listened with cooled interest. Since it was not 
teacups and triptychs, why was she bored about it ? 

“ Very interesting, no doubt,” she said, dryly. “ But rather 
immoral, don’t you think ?” 

“ Immoral ? No : there are many things more immoral, — 
Mrs. Henry V. Clams, for instance.” 

The Lady Joan winced. She hesitated a moment whether 
she would seem very virtuous or seem very charitable and 
beyond all prejudices. 

“ It is too kind of you to be so interested,” she said, at 
length. “ You must tell it all to lo : he’ll be rushing olf 
directly, with soup in one hand and bank-notes in the other. 
Certainly the girl’s case is very sad ; but then, you see she 
brought it on herself. Why did she listen to her painter 
before she saw the marriage-lines? I should think your 
best way would be to speak to the Austrian Consul, or per- 
haps your Princess Vera would condescend. I think they’d 
send her back for nothing; and I suppose she has some 
friends ?” 

“ None, I believe,” said Etoile. “ But do not trouble your- 
self ; it will not cost much to set her up in some little trade 
that will enable her to keep herself and the boy. That is all 
I meant to ask your advice about.” 

“ Of course I would do anything in charity that I could,” 
said Lady Joan, vaguely feeling that she had made a wrong 
move. “ But a ballet-girl and an illegitimate child and all 
that, — one hardly knows what to do. I’ve just sent a house- 
maid away for light conduct. One must be just : one must 
not put a premium on immorality.” 

“ It is a pity Society often allows so high a one !” answered 
Etoile, with that flash of contempt which the Casa Challoner 
was learning to fear. Lady Joan, however, was always ready 
for any thrust. 

“ I don’t think Society does,” she answered : she always 
defended Society, since Society accepted her. “ It gives cer- 
tain rules, and if you keep to them it has no business to at- 
tack you, — and never does, in point of fact. Women are 
rash themselves and headstrong, and do foolish things, and 
then they complain of Society. I’ve no prejudices, — not one : 
I would just as soon shake hands with your ballet-girl as with 
a duchess. But, you see, as long as one lives in the world one 


FRIENDSHIP. 


193 


can’t follow every impulse of one’s heart, and these poor girls 
just throw themselves away on some headlong passion, and 
then think it very cruel of humanity not to be ready with 
gold christening-cups and rose-silk cradles for their babies. 
Their fate’s very dreadful and very hard, no doubt, but they 
make it themselves, you see.” 

“ By forgetting themselves, which women in Society never 
do, no doubt.” 

“ Of course they never do, except that ass of a Geltrude 
Chemnitz ! If you don’t remember yourself, who will ?” said 
the Lady Joan, with a pleasant laugh, ignoring the equivoque. 
“ As for the world well lost for love, and all that, it’s rubbish, 
you know. The world is too strong for anybody that sets up 
against it. And when you’ve lost the world, i.e., your bread 
and cheese in it, love flies out of the window. That’s common 
sense.” 

“ It would be common sense, then, if this poor Hungarian 
descended to infamy to feed herself.” 

“Just so. Having once slipped into the pit to gather a 
flower, she ought to go down to the bottom to pick up a bit 
of silver. But that’s the sort of consistency you poetical 
creatures never possess. You will fling yourselves to perdition 
in 2ifuria of self-sacriflce, and then you are supremely aston- 
ished that the world only thinks you are a donkey whose legs 
are broken. Society can’t classify. It only lays down a few 
broad lines, and packs into two sets the people who keep in 
’em and the people who jump over ’em. Unjust? Oh, I 
dare say. But the thing is so. It’s no good kicking against 
the pricks. No doubt Magdalen is a charming person, utterly 
underrated, and very much misjudged, and all the rest of it; 
but all that common folk can judge by is that she has dragged 
her hair in the dust and has made a beast of herself ” 

“ Without corresponding advantages !” 

Lady Joan laughed, but when she was on her high horse 
of morality she rode it with cynicism indeed, but with con- 
summate coolness, and would now and then enunciate opinions 
with which Hannah More herself could have found no fault. 
Indeed, to do her justice, women who sacrificed themselves — 
at a loss — did seem to her “ too poor for heaven, and too pale 
for hell.” 

“ I am shocked at you,” she said, with her frankest smile. 

I 17 


194 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ What is the use of railing against Society ? Society, after 
all, is only Humanity en masse, and the opinion of it must 
be the opinion of the bulk of human minds. Complaints 
against Society are like the lions’ against the man’s picture. 
No doubt the lions would have painted the combat as going 
just the other way, but then, so long as it is the man who 
has the knife or the gun, and the palette and the pencil, where 
is the use of the lions howling about injustice? Society has 
the knife and the pencil, — that’s the long and the short of it ; 
and if people don’t behave themselves they feel ’em both, 
and have to knock under. They’re knifed first, and then 
caricatured, — as the lions were. I can’t see so much injustice 
myself. The world’s a very pleasant place, if you’ll only keep 
straight in it.” 

And the Lady Joan pulled up the ruffles of old lace about 
her shapely throat, and glanced with a little grin at two big 
envelopes just came in, — invitations to a ball at the Mac- 
scrips’, and a dramatic representation at one of the minor 
Legations. 

Etoile bade her good-evening, and went away. Left alone, 
she snapped her fingers at the deserted tea-table, jumped a 
step or two of a bolero, lit a cigar, and, going to her chamber, 
got into a gown of loose Eastern brocade with gold threads 
shining in it, twisted a string of amber beads round her head, 
and felt dressed appropriately for the guests she expected, — 
Victor Louche, a second-class French dramatist, and M. Ron- 
soulet, a very great sculptor, with Madame Patauge, who was 
Madame Ronsoulet de facto, but not de jure. They were 
tonic that she required after a Wednesday afternoon. 

Society is like the porter of your Paris house. It frowns 
and bars the door, or rushes to bring all the keys to you, 
according as you have filled its pockets or have left them 
empty. Lady Joan knew her porter. 

She was not rich, indeed, not even with all the teacups and 
triptychs in the world ; but then she knew how to be obliging ; 
she would run up the back-stairs to spare the porter any 
trouble about the front, and when the porter was grumpiest 
and sulkiest, would look up in his face and smile. No porter 
could long resist such conduct, — not even the grim porteress 
that is called Mrs. Grundy. 

But there is an amount of fatigue in being so very consid- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


195 


erate to your porter, and Lady Joan always recompensed her- 
self for her consideration with some little pleasant indulgence 
or other when the porter could not see through her keyhole. 

In a sense, too, she liked the sharp and strong contrasts of 
her life. She loved the hisque soup after the barley broth, 
the caviare toast after the boiled sole with herbs. She liked 
keeping the goats and the sheep apart, and frisking up the 
wild glens with the one and feeding in the fat pastures with 
the other. She liked lunching decorously off cold lamb with 
a clergyman’s family and talking of her dear friends the deans 
and the bishops, and she liked going to an artists’ ball after- 
wards and dancing and screaming till the daylight shone in at 
the windows. She liked driving staidly about with her great 
cousin of Hebrides with the white-wanded footmen of Heb- 
rides behind, and she liked rattling the same nights about the 
streets, in the white Roman moonlight, in a hired cab, with 
her friends, singing choruses. She liked having a bevy of 
married and maiden dames to tea on a Tuesday afternoon and 
enchanting them with old laces miraculously purchased and 
pattern opinions miraculously fabricated, and she liked dining 
at home that evening with a few choice spirits who quoted 
Beaudelaire in a haze of smoke, and brought out the suggest- 
ive little statuettes, and held that none but fools could believe 
in any deity under any name, and quoted as their amatory 
gospel, “ V amour, c'est la fenune d’un autre.^' 

On the whole, there was much wisdom in these ways of 
life. She saw life in all its aspects, and got credit from all 
its actors. And she seldom made mistakes in either the dull 
comedy or the gay one, — except, indeed, when sometimes she 
talked too long to a cynic or met the eyes of a guileless 
woman. 

At such times she would quail a little, and feel as though, 
despite all her cashmeres of conventionality and sables of con- 
tent, some one had stripped her naked in the full blaze of a 
noonday sun. 

Her guests came in all together, laughing, happy, and good- 
humored, bringing with them much sparkle of fresh wit, and 
much smell of stale smoke, into the chambers where Mrs. 
Grundy had sat in august majesty but an hour before. 

Victor Louche was a thin, sallow man, with a pungent 
tongue and a salacious humor, who lived among actors and 


196 


FRIENDSHIP. 


actresses, and was tlie life and soul of winter nights at Bi- 
gnon’s, and summer days at Etretat; Madame Patauge was a 
cheery soul, with much mirth, many anecdotes, and a reper- 
tory of all the liveliest songs of the last half-century, which 
she could still sing with power and zest, like the female La- 
blache that she was. Madame Patauge, originally the daughter 
of a house-porter in Paris, in days when Louis Philippe was 
king, knew her Paris as a child its nurse ; she had gone on 
the stage of the Opera Comique and been successful ; she had 
married a journalist, who had beaten her and spent her money, 
she had consoled herself in the atelier of M. Bonsoulet when 
he was unknown to fame, and had finally settled down perma- 
nently side by side with him when he became famous. She 
was a very big woman, with a very big voice, and M. Bon- 
soulet, who was a very little man, spent life much as a pigmy 
might do chained between the four paws of an elephant. But 
it was a good-natured elephant, and was totally unconscious 
that it crushed him ; it thought, indeed, that carrying him 
about by its trunk was a benefit : female elephants have these 
delusions. 

She was an honest soul ; she never sought to conceal what 
she had been, or what she was ; when she had quarrelled with 
her husband she had abused him soundly, packed up her 
trunks, and departed from under his roof, with the frankest 
avowal of her intentions ; she never concealed either the storms 
or the sunshine of her adventurous years ; and she adored 
Bonsoulet with an adoration as big as her person. Neverthe- 
less, a world which accepted the Lady Joan rejected this poor 
Madame, who was only Bonsoulet by courtesy. She was mal 
vue by Society, though she was a hundred times the better, 
truer, tenderer, and worthier woman. In fact, Society would 
have blushed to have been supposed to have even known the 
mere fact of her existence. 

Lady Joan invited this trio of sorry sinners to dinner be- 
cause the songs and anecdotes tickled her palate; because 
after Mrs. Grundy at tea she required mental tonic and re- 
freshment ; because Bonsoulet would make her own bust for 
nothing ; because Victor Louche had always known a good 
deal about her ; because — there were fifty becauses. Besides, 
nobody knew of these Bohemian banquets ; her servants never 
talked ; and if she were seen driving up to the little villa out- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


197 


side Porta Pia, where MM. Ronsoulet and Louche were living 
together, she only went to have her bust modelled, — that was 
all. 

“Do you speak to that creature?” said Society to her, 
once, when the good-tempered fat woman smiled, and nodded, 
and waved hands to her in delighted recognition across the 
crowd on the Pincio. Such contre-temps will now and then 
occur to the most perfect diplomatists. And the Lady Joan 
replied, with that frank regard which always told her intimate 
friends when she was lying with the most hardihood, — 

“ Well, you know, Mr. Challoner’s always telling me I’m 
too good-natured to people. But I see her at Ronsoulet’s 
studio. What can I do ? One must just bow. I haven’t the 
heart to cut people: I’m so weak about all that. Besides, 
you know, I have not the stiff ideas of other women : my 
poor mother was always so over-kind to all artists. You see, 
we are so well known. We can do things other folks can’t. 
Nobody ever can say a word against us.” 

So Society gave her much credit, alike for frankness, spirit, 
and propriety, a triad seldom allowed to exist in unison ; and 
it was the general feeling in society that she was a very excel- 
lent young woman, and that it was high treason against her to 
suppose for a moment that she had any other attractions up 
at Fiordelisa than her bees and her beasts, her pigs and her 
poultry. 

On the whole. Lady Joan was as successful as that ingenious 
smuggler who traded in sheep, to run brandy ashore, and whose 
upper deck was crowded with innocent lambs, while the alcohol 
that cheated the revenues reposed cask against cask, all snug 
and unseen, underneath in the hold. 

“ Is it worth the trouble ?” landsmen wonder, seeing the 
contraband sloops hover off the Spanish shores : “ is it worth 
so much calculation, so many risks, such constant oscillation 
between safety and ruin ?” The contrabandista will tell you 
that it is, — that no money rings so cheerily as his, and no wine 
tastes so well. 

Lady Joan had the same opinion. 

Her’s were only small gains, like the smuggler’s, — a duchess’s 
bow, an ambassadress’s nod, cards to half a hundred houses, 
bankers’ balls, clergymen’s praises, American dinners, — no 
more than the smuggler’s dollars and tobacco. But then these 

17 * 


198 


FRIENDSHIP. 


were everything to her. Some desire the apple of the Hesper- 
ides, others only hunger for a sweet potato. Lady Joan was 
of this wise other section. And she bought her sweet potato 
in the right market, and ato it, and was happy. 


CHAPTEK XVI. 

The Scrope-Stair sisters made a Cerberus quite invaluable 
stationed forever at the hall door of the Casa Challoner. 

Cerberus of Hades was but a primitive and one-ideaed beast, 
whose sole office was to prevent miserable sinners from escaping 
their punishment. This Cerberus of society was a much more 
civilized being, and had the advanced views proper to its epoch, 
— the epoch that has the Triangle instead of Troy. Cerberus, 
by alternately fawning and growling, induced Society to swallow 
the discrepancies of the Casa Challoner, as Cerberus itself had 
swallowed them. And it is only this first swallowing that is 
any trouble. An impropriety to Society is like a fish-bone in 
the human throat ; fifty to one it will not slip down, but if 
once it pass all faces are calm ; the fish-bone is accepted in 
safety, and will be heard of no more. A little butter will be 
taken after it, — nothing else. 

Old Lord George had not utterly forgotten that he had once 
been a man of the world, though he had adopted an air of 
sleepy senility, which kept him out of rows and served him 
well ; and old Sir George would watch the Lady Joan with a 
twinkle in his eye, and take her measure very correctly. He 
kept his lids half shut, and was very hard of hearing for the 
majority of the world, and could act a cross between King 
Lear and Poor Tom with an admirable skill when any quarrel 
was going on around him. But he had not forgotten that he 
had once been “ handsome Scrope” in the guard-room of St. 
James’s, and he appraised his daughters’ friend very neatly, 
and did not like his daughters’ friendship. But what could 
he do all alone ? 

Middleway stayed up there, — the pious Middleway, who 
talked of Providence as his own Senior Partner, and of Para- 
dise as a sort of bonus awarded for thrifty and timely insur- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


199 


ance; Middleway dined at tlie Casa Challoner, and took his 
beloved girls to Fiordelisa, strong in their maiden innocence 
and their blond chignons. To be sure, there was the Seventh 
Commandment printed among its brethren in any church 
where Middleway officiated, — the Seventh Commandment in 
all the glaring outspokenness and culpable heedlessness of the 
feelings of Society, of which Moses, like too many other 
great writers, was guilty, and there were times when the ex- 
cellent Middle way felt that the Decalogue ought, like the 
Decameron, to be edited in more polite language. But still, 
qualms or no qualms. Middleway lunched with Mrs. Henry 
V. Clams, and visited at Fiordelisa, and where Middleway, 
austere though courteous, boldly trod, how should poor old 
trembling Lord Gieorge dare to refuse to enter? 

Besides, there was Marjory ! 

At the thought of Marjory all rebellion would die out of 
him, — Maijory, with her pinched lips, her sharp voice, and her 
resolute will, who, if he ventured to cross her wishes, would 
never let him have a brazier of charcoal, or a glass of whiskey, 
or a bank-note in his pocket ever again throughout his dreary 
days, but would remind him fifty times oftener than she did 
already that if he had not been a spendthrift his daughters 
would not now have to trudge through mud and dust to copy 
gallery canvasses and chapel frescoes. There was Middleway, 
and there was Marjory: so old Lord George stifled his con- 
science, and let the mutton from Fiordelisa be set upon his 
table, and the eggs from Fiordelisa be broken into his sherry, 
and pretended to be dozing in the sun when the Lady Joan on 
the terrace of Fiordelisa called loris to her feet. He was a 
gentleman at heart, this poor, worn-out, weary octogenarian ; 
he had been an English soldier, and was still an English gen- 
tleman, and sometimes he felt ashamed. But he had grown 
timid with age, and his home was chill and dreary, and his 
daughters bade him obey, and he did obey, and Lady Joan 
sent him new eggs and fresh vegetables with the most grate- 
ful regularity. She had grown rather bored with Cerberus, 
but Cerberus was still very useful to her, and she threw the 
admirable watch-dog the titbits she knew it desired. 

She called them darling girls, though they were older than 
herself, had them always to her second-rate dinners, gave them 
patterns for gowns, took them to the theatres, sent them game 


200 


FRIENDSHIP. 


and honey and wine, had them to stay at Fiordelisa, and, above 
all, let Marjory feast her eyes on loris. 

Poor Marjory, in the beginning of time when Lady Joan 
had first arrived from Abana and Pharpar, Orontes and 
Euphrates, with her huntress’s blood all on fire for want of 
something to kill, had not been a watch-dog : she had been a 
catspaw. 

Before Lady Joan had reached the sublime height of intre- 
pidity from which she now invited the Church to lunch up at 
Fiordelisa, whilst she was still under that certain chill and 
awe of that vision of the British Bona Dea which had loomed 
before her on her landing at Brindisi, she had deemed it worth 
while to be prudent. 

In pursuit of prudence she had bidden loris pay a semblance 
of court to her dear friend Marjory, and took Marjory about 
with her conspicuously. loris laughed, pitied himself, and 
obeyed. He played his part gracefully in the meaningless 
comedy, and its victim based upon it her wildest hopes, as 
baseless as they were wild. When she perceived that she had 
been but fooled, — used as the mere screen of another’s con- 
venience, — the passion of that fading hope survived the death 
of hope. She consumed her heart in rage and misery, but 
consumed it in silence. To break with the Casa Challoner 
would have been to lose all sight of loris : she continued to 
kiss her friend in public and private, and nurtured her un- 
spoken passion in her breast, feeding it hungrily on every look 
and tone and gesture of her friend’s lover. She saw what 
her friend did not see ; she foresaw the time when the proverb 
would hold good that too much tying loosens. She marked 
her friend’s mistakes, and gauged the power of her friend’s 
tyranny ; she saw when the chain was strained, and lay in wait 
for some dim future, as the gray adder hides under the stone. 

She loved him with the terrible love of the woman who 
hungers for a life that will no more come to her than the silver 
moon in summer will come to a child’s cries, — who knows that 
his hours, his thoughts, his senses, are all another’s and will 
never be hers, yet dreams of some day when disaster or dis- 
appointment may drag him down within her grasp, and whis- 
pers in the hush of the night to her own sick soul, “ Who 
knows? who knows?” 

The comedy had long ceased to be played, and the years had 


FRIENDSHIP. 


201 


gone by since then, but the desire of the moth for the star still 
burnt on, and the gentle grace, the tender familiarity, the 
kindly courtesy of his ways with women fed the smouldering 
fire with every unthinking action. She knew that it was use- 
less, hopeless, rootless, but still, in the dreary routine and re- 
pression of her days, she hugged closer this one sweetness : 
only to see him, to hear him, be where he was, this she deemed 
better than naught ; she fought firmly for the Temple of all 
the Virtues because on its altars her own hopes' smouldered, 
aud when she defended the innocence of its rites, there was 
so robust a ring of sincerity in her voice because it hurt her 
so fiercely to think of those long amorous summers which the 
nightingales of Fiordelisa hymned. 

Lady Joan knew her folly well enough, and gleefully grinned 
over it in secret, and even approved of it. It was useful to 
her, the one supreme test-weight by which the Lady Joan 
balanced all things. 

“ If the poor ass likes to fret herself to fiddle-strings after lo, 
let her,” said the Lady Joan in her thoughts ; and Lady Joan 
in public kissed her with effusion before a dozen spinsters, and 
took her often to the theatres, and said to everybody, “ If lo 
would only be persuaded to marry that dear darling good girl ! 
— but he won’t hear of it, you know. Such a pity ! — such 
friends as we all are, it would be delightful !” 

Meantime, Marjory Scrope grew passive, if not resigned, as 
the season swept on, and accepted the reign of the Lady Joan 
as inevitable, and would have been even willing to make 
common cause with her against any invader of her sovereignty, 
and, sharp of eye and ear, saw many a sign that escaped the 
happy and blind vanity of her friend, heard many a yawn, de- 
tected many a gesture of weariness and impatience, and had 
almost ceased to be jealous of what she saw had to him be- 
come but a habit. But at any gleam of a fresh interest, any 
glance of a new thought for him, she sprang up as a snake 
springs: not the Lady Joan herself could ever have been as 
swift to see it, as ferocious to resent it, as she was. 

And, with the prescience of an unerring way, the hatred 
of Mariory Scrope-Stairs had darted down and fastened on 
Etoile. 

Marjory, indeed, was hardly used. Jacob for Rachel had 
not served more devotedly than she for six years had served 
1 * 


202 


FRIENDSHIP. 


the Lady Joan for the wage of proximity to loris. She had 
toiled early and late ; she had copied old frescoes and let the 
Lady Joan sell them ; she had worked chairs and cushions and 
finished lace that her friend had begun and got tired of ; she 
had never minded being asked at the eleventh hour to fill up a 
place at a dinner, unexpectedly left vacant ; she had trudged 
through sludge and sleet on bitter winter days to ransack curi- 
osity-barrows for the Casa Challoner; and finally, she had gone 
about in society armed cap-d-pie in defence of that Temple of 
all the Virtues, and made herself generally ridiculous with a 
stubbornness and a heroism worthy of a far better cause. She 
had led a hard, dull, joyless life. She had been a watch-dog, 
and been bound to take blows and be out in all weathers ; she 
had been a screen, and had borne all the brunt of the fire, and 
been pushed aside when not wanted ; she had been a catspaw 
and was left with burnt fingers and sore heart out in the cold 
whilst her clever friend gleefully munched the fruit. She had 
been hardly dealt with for six mortal years ; but she had been 
able to bear it all for the sake of that baseless, shapeless, yet 
inextinguishable hope which had sustained her. She had 
grown used, with the dull pain of an old half healed wound, 
to seeing the supremacy of the Lady Joan. 

But now ! — She hated the new-comer with that deadly 
hatred which has no pity, as it has no parallel, — the hatred 
of an obscure and discontented woman for the woman who is 
eminent and adored. 

Etoile herself never thought about her at all, save to feel 
compassion for her vaguely as the slavey of Society and the 
shadow of the Lady Joan. But Marjory Scrope thought of 
her from morn till night, watched her gestures, studied her 
every word, hated her for the very frou-frou of her skirts, 
the mere silent softness of her sweeping velvets, hated her 
beyond all for the look that the eyes of loris gained whenever 
they gazed on her, and in the stillness of the nights dreamed 
of her, and, waking, muttered, “ I have borne enough : never 
will I bear that! — never, never, never!” 

“ Take the watering-pot,” had said that wise woman of the 
world. Lady Cardiff. 

Perhaps, if Etoile had taken the watering-pot, — if she had 
drunk tea at the Scrope-Stairs, given the Scrope-Stairs a few 
pretty things, praised the Scrope-Stair drawings, and bought 


FRIENDSHIP. 


203 


a water-color of the School of Athens, — even this sandstorm 
of envy and hatred might have been allayed. But that was 
not her way. 

“ My dear, you never seem to fear the mob,” said Lady 
Cardiff. “ It is just the mob that builds up guillotines ; and 
the woman who has genius is just Marie Antoinette to it, — 
‘ the accursed proud Austrian,’ — and the mob howls till the 
axe falls.” 

No doubt it was a true exordium ; but Etoile feared the 
mob no more than did the daughter of Maria Theresa. 

This night, when the Lady Joan sternly bade her knight 
attend the knightless damsels to their home, loris obeyed. 
He was aware of the hopeless passion he had long before in- 
spired, and pitied the woman who felt it, and was friends with 
her in the same kindly, courtly, gentle spirit with which he 
took off his hat to the old orange-woman at the corner and 
asked the cobbler’s wife in the cellar how her rheumatism 
fared. It was tiresome to him to go out of his way in the 
damp chilly night, with the snow beginning to fall, to escort 
Cerberus whom his mistress had chosen for the nonce to dress 
up as a Una without a lion. But he did the behest chival- 
rously, and went with the sisters gayly and courteously to their 
dull, old, dark, long palace down by the Forum Trajano, and, 
having discharged his duty, thought that he had justly earned 
a little recreation. 

loris, with people he disliked, was apt to pour out on them 
a graceful effusion which they took for cordiality and regard. 
They were never more mistaken in their lives. To women 
who wearied him, to men he mistrusted, to enemies always, 
and to strangers generally, loris was courtier enough by habits, 
and meridional enough in nature, to be unrelaxing in courtesy 
and ardent in protestation : amiability is the armor of the 
South, as much as rudeness is of the North. 

In the dusk on the staircase that night, loris as he had es- 
corted Cerberus had seen a jewel shining on the stone, had 
stooped for it, and recognized a black onyx medallion, with a 
monogram in pearls, which he remembered seeing once about the 
throat of Etoile. He did not send it up-staij s to her by the 
servant, as he might have done, since he had left her sitting 
by the fire, but said nothing of it to his companions, and 
slipped it into his pocket. His escort ended, and the sisters 


204 


FRIENDSHIP. 


safe at home, he went to his own home, dined hastily, and, 
calling about eight o’clock at the house on the Monte Cavallo, 
sent to know if the Comtesse d’Avesnes would receive him. 

Etoile, her own brief dinner ended, was sitting in a low 
chair by the hearth, with great Tsar at her feet, looking over 
some old prints, Marcantonios amidst them, which she had 
bought that morning. 

The room was large, but warm ; great howls of flowers stood 
on the marble tables ; old tapestries and embroideries were 
scattered about ; there were sketches here and there ; the 
hearth was wide and open ; oak logs were burning on it, and 
their flame shone red on the giallo antico of its huge carved 
chimney-piece ; a marble copy of the Belvedere Mercury which 
she had bought stood near, with a cluster of rose-red azaleas 
in vases around it; and a bronze of the Vatican Jove was 
half hidden in white camellias. A certain sense of home fell 
on loris as he entered, — a sense that never touched him in his 
own lonely house or within the chambers of the Casa Challoner. 

Etoile, who was dressed in white stufis that fell softly about 
her, and had a knot of geranium at her throat, turned, with 
a smile, as she saw him. 

“ Is it anything very urgent ? Has Lady Joan found a fault 
in the Venetian costume?” 

A shadow passed over his mobile face at the name : he 
came forward and dropped on one knee by the hearth. 

“ Nothing urgent ; and perhaps you will rebuke me for an 
intrusive impertinence. I had the fortune to find this to- 
night, and I could not resist restoring it into your own hands.” 

She gave a cry of pleasure. 

“ Oh, that is very good of you ! My dear locket ! I had 
just sent to advertise for it. You shall look in it for your 
reward.” 

“ May I indeed ?” 

She pressed the secret spring for him, and he saw the por- 
trait of Dorotea Coronis. 

His heart beat with a quick relief. He had expected to see 
some face of his own sex. 

“ The Duchesse Santorin is very happy to have such a 
friend,” he said, gravely. 

“ But you barely look at it : there is no more beautiful face 
in Europe.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


205 


“ I do not care to look at it,” said loris, and his soft eyes 
gazed at her own face. 

Etoile felt her cheek grow warm, — she could not tell why, — 
and she drew a little away. 

“Make Tsar move farther, — he has very bad' manners, — 
and rise up. Prince loris. There is a pleasant chair there.” 

“ Will you not call me lo ? Every one does.” 

“ I do not care to do what every one does,” she answered 
him, a little impatiently. She seemed to hear the “ lo ! lo !” 
of Lady Joan’s imperious demands ringing loudly over hill 
and vale by the banks of the Almo. 

He caressed Tsar, and sank into the chair near her, within 
the warmth of the hearth. 

“You are all alone ? You are going to spend your evening 
alone ?” 

She smiled. 

“ ‘ Never less alone than when alone.’ It is fortunate for 
me that I feel so, for I have always been left very much to 
myself.” 

“ But surely ” 

“You mean I might be out somewhere to-night? Oh, 
yes ; and any other nights. But I do not care very much for 
society, — not even for that of Paris. In my own house there 
I receive a good deal : that I like ; but society is monotonous : 
it has no infinite variety, as study has, and art. Besides, I 
think the artist, like the saint, should keep himself ‘ unspotted 
from the world’ as far as possible. It only dims our sight and 
dwarfs our aims.” 

“ And you are not very strong in health, I fear.” 

“ They say so. Perhaps I have tried to do too much too 
early.” 

“ The perfect fruit and flower have been too much for the 
young tree that bore them.” 

“ Perfect ! Ah, if you could only know how ill content I 
am with all that men call great in what I do, — how poor and 
pale the best is beside the visions that I see !” 

“ That of course. What Baffaelle has left us must be to 
the glories he imagined as the weaver’s dye to the sunset’s 
fires. Tell me, — ^you have been in Borne before ?” 

“ Never. I studied in Belgium and in Paris, — nowhere 
else : but to be taught by Israels was almost an atonement for 

18 


206 


FRIENDSHIP. 


the loss of Rome. But it is because I lost Rome in my 
student days that I cannot endure to waste any hours here in 
the mere distractions of Society which I can have anywhere 
else. In your city it is so easy to ‘ be with the immortals.’ 
I wander in- your wonderful haunted places as long as it is 
light, and then when evening comes on I am tired.” 

“ You do wisely for yourself, — though cruelly to others.” 

“ Ah, pray do not make me compliments : I dislike them. 
We are not in Society now ; we can be natural.” 

“ You always doubt my sincerity.” 

“ No, not always. Tsar would not like you so well if you 
could not be true sometimes.” 

loris lifted up the noble head of the dog and kissed him. 

“ I think I am always true — except when she makes me 
false,” he murmured, as he stooped to the hound. ‘‘ Madame, 
tell me more of yourself. You cannot think what interest it 
has for me. Nay, I am saying no flattery now, but the sim- 
plest fact. When the world says ‘ Etoile’ every one wonders ; 
I have wondered with the rest. Do not be angered.” 

“ Why should I be ? I will tell you anything you like. 
Not that there is much to tell. My years are written on my 
panels and canvases. I have lived between the studio and 
the open air.” 

There was something dreamy and familiar in the warm, 
wood-scented air, the mellow light, the bright hearth, the 
shadowy, fragrant chamber. It seemed to loris that he had 
been there all his life watching the glow from the fire fall on 
the white folds of her dress and finding out the red geraniums 
at her throat ; whilst little by little, in the easy communicative- 
ness of fireside talk, the various changes of her life, with its 
ambitions and its fruitions, passed before him, and her words 
built up to his fancy the little village on the green Meuse 
waters and the dull old house in the gardens of the Luxem- 
bourg. 

Etoile very seldom spoke of herself. 

She had grown to see that no one ever believed a word she 
said : so silence had become a habit with her. 

What they expected she did not know ; nor, perhaps, did 
they any better. But the mere truth never had a chance of 
being credited. It never has. 

“ Truth is a gem that loves the deep,” applies to truth 


FRIENDSHIP. 


207 


metaphysical, historical, philosophical. But truth personal 
is rather a flower like the brier rose, too homely, too simple, 
and too thorny for men to care to gather it. They like a lie, 
which, like the barometrical flower, will change its color half 
a dozen times a day. 

With loris she had a different feeling. She was willing to 
talk to him, glad to take him back with her in fancy to her 
childish days. He listened with that soft, mute attention, 
that homage of scarce-broken silence, which his gaze made 
more eloquent than the most eager words of other men. The 
firelight shone on his delicate dark head ; his eyes were dreamy, 
musing, tender. The moments sped swiftly away and became 
hours. At last he drew a deep breath, as of a man who casts 
off a burden of dread. 

“ And amidst it all — ^you have never loved !” 

“ Loved !” echoed Etoile, in a vague, startled sort of sur- 
prise. Her face grew warm ; she felt troubled, she could not 
have told why. 

“ Is it true ?” he persisted. “ It is true, is it not, you have 
never loved any one ?” 

Etoile bent forward and put back a burning piece of wood 
that had fallen too far. As she did so, one of the geranium 
flowers fell out from among the blossoms at her throat. He 
caught it from the fire. 

“ Answer me,” he said, eagerly. “ Is it true ?” 

“ Certainly true, — yes. But I do not know why ” 

He put the scarlet flower in his breast. 

“ Why I have the daring to ask you so personal a question ? 
Only to ask it seems a profanation, and I need not have asked 
it ; for I knew ” 

“ What can you mean ? AVhat can you know ?” 

“ I knew that it was so before you spoke a word. The first 
night I saw you I said in my thoughts, ‘ That woman has no 
past;’ for a woman who has had no passion has no past, no more 
than those flowers, born to-day. that are at your breast. Then I 
studied those scattered poems that are signed ‘ Etoile,’ and I was 
yet more sure. You write of love from without, not from 
within. It is a thing you have read of, dreamed of, built up to 
yourself in fancy, but have not felt. You theorize on it exter- 
nally, as you might of life in some far planet more beautiful than 
earth. But love, you know, — no, you do not know, — is a fiercer. 


208 


FRIENDSHIP. 


fonder, ay, and perhaps a grosser and viler thing than you have 
ever been touched by. You have said to yourself, ‘ I shall 
love like that some day.* You have not said to yourself, ‘ I 
loved like that in a day that is dead.’ Now, between those 
two there is such a gulf, — such an abyss, — such a sea of flame ! 
And when you have crossed that gulf you will not look at us 
all any longer with those clear, candid, wondering eyes, as if 
you had strayed down out of a better world than ours. No ; 
then you will only look back, and you will be no longer pure 
of heart, as you are now. Tell me : am I not right?” 

A flush went over her face. He was half leaning, half 
kneeling by her ; his eyes watched her with a dreamy pleasure 
in them, half sensual, half spiritual. 

He was utterly in earnest as he spoke; he meant truly what 
he uttered ; but he was a master in the power of casting sweet 
trouble into a woman’s soul, and there was an added pleasure 
to him when the soul was deep and calm like a lake and his 
was the first hand to drop either a pearl or a stone into its 
depths. 

“ Am I not right?” he murmured, softly. 

She pushed her hair back from her forehead a little wearily 
and with a sense of confusion. 

“ Yes, — oh, yes,” she answered him, “ I suppose a woman’s 
life without love is incomplete. I suppose I only sleep ; but 
I can care for no one — in that way. Art alone moves me.” 

He had risen as he had spoken last ; and now, bending 
downward with exquisite grace, he touched her hand with 
his lips as softly as a bird’s wing might brush a rose in 
passing. 

“ Happy he for whom you shall awake,” he murmured, as he 
stooped. 

Then he glanced at the clock, bowed low, caressed the dog, 
and went. 

The clock-hands stood at eleven. 

Etoile sat without moving as he had left her gazing into 
the fire. A nameless emotion stirred within her and made 
her pulse thrill. A troubled pain, that yet was not pain at 
all, was on her. “ What have I missed ?” she wondered ; and 
then her face grew warm again, and she rose with a restless 
impatience of herself, not understanding what ailed her. 

Meanwhile, loris passed out into the moonlit night, which 


FRIENDSHIP. 


209 


was cold and wet, flinging his furs about him in the teeth of 
the north wind, and, with the geranium flower hidden in his 
breast, mounted the staircase of the Casa Challoner. 

At the Casa Challoner the dinner had been gay, but Lady 
Joan had been gloomy. 

In vain did Victor Louche tell his best stories, and Madame 
Paturge cap them with still better ; in vain did both of them 
sing the funniest and naughtiest songs that theatres and cafes- 
cliantants had ever rung with ; in vain did they disport them- 
selves and earn their truffles and their wine and their entrance 
into the Temple of all the Virtues ; in vain : the brow of the 
Lady Joan was dark, her high spirits had departed, and her 
eyes were as two scimitars flashing ominously in moonlight. 

Victor Louche, innocent or malicious, called out from the 
piano at eleven o’clock, “Ah, 'pardieu! where is Prince lo? 
I thought I missed something familiar from the menu.^^ 

The cheery Paturge from a capacious chair sent out a cone 
of tobacco-smoke. 

“ Ah, yes, where is Prince Charming ? It seemed to me 
there was something wanting. You have never quarrelled with 
him, ma mie ? He is too delightful, ^uch manners ! Ah !” 

“ Quarrel !” said Lady Joan, scornfully. “ Who could 
quarrel with lo ? Quarrel with a bean-stalk ! That’s more 
character than he has.” 

“ Jealous : who of, I wonder ?” thought the astute Victor, 
with a crash of the chords. 

Mr. Challoner was, as usual, in his own sanctum, with the 
“ Times” and the Share-list. 

Madame Paturge looked across at Monsieur Ronsoulet and 
winked ; but the wink was lost on him : he was thinking of 
his statue of Palestrina for the new Opera-house, and a little 
of the Chateaubriand at dinner. He roused himself slowly 
to what they were talking about. 

“ To be sure : where is loris?” he muttered. “ I never dined 
here without him before. And there is no one in Europe with 
a truer or more delicate instinct for the arts. Where is he?” 

“ I expected him to dinner,” said Lady Joan, sulkily. 
When she was out of temper she sometimes told the truth. 

The Turkish curtains were at that moment put aside, and 
through the doorway loris entered, kissed Madame Paturge’s 
hands with gay gallantry, saluted Ronsoulet with reverential 

18 * 


210 


FRIENDSHIP. 


friendship, and accosted Victor Louche with a graceful com- 
pliment on his last comedy. 

“ Such perfect manners, ma mie. You will never change 
for the better,” said Madame Paturge in a low tone to her 
hostess, who, however, did not even hear, but said roughly 
and curtly to the offender, — 

“ Where have you been?” 

“ I have dined at home. I found a mass of correspondence.” 

“ I told you to go with the Stairs.” 

“ I accompanied those amiable sisters.” 

“ Well, why didn’t you come straight back here?” 

“ I remembered orders I had to give Giannino at home. I 
knew you could not miss me ; you would be too well amused.” 

“ You’ve been writing all the evening?” 

“ Yes.” 

The eyes of loris began to grow a little angry under their 
long lashes. Victor Louche, who feared a scene, began to 
sing “ Qa me chatoullle dans le nez.^’ 

Madame Paturge nudged her hostess. 

“ Perhaps he has been playing at the club, and lost money.” 

“ lo never plays,” says the Lady Joan, savagely. 

There was an awkward silence. 

Victor Louche sang very loud and made a great noise with 
the pedals. loris crossed over to M. Konsoulet. 

“ Caro maestro, how goes the Palestrina?” 

“ The bean-stalk won’t bend forever,” thought Madame 
Paturge in her capacious chair. 

Fortunately for the preservation of peace there then entered 
Mimo and Trillo and a youth of three-and-twenty, Guido Ser- 
ravalle, who sang a fine second to her favorite ritornello. 

Trillo brought her word of an Inspecteur des Beaux- Arte 
who was coming from Petersburg and would buy a great deal ; 
Mimo, of an order that Lord Norwich had given him to find 
an altar-screen, trecento, if possible; and Guido Serravalle 
brought her a new song and an old lute, inlaid with ivory and 
silver, as a present. They sufficed to avert the thunders of 
her wrath ; but, even as she hastily reckoned that the lute was 
certainly worth three or four hundred francs and smiled on 
the donor, her brow was still dark and her face was still 
sullen. 

The sagacious Madame Paturge, from her chair blowing 


FRIENDSHIP. 211 

clouds of cigarette-smoke about her bead, watched and winked 
once more to the slumbering Ronsoulet. 

“She is jealous, and he is not. No, he does not even resent 
that lute : he is only glad that the lute spares him a scene. 
Ah ! there is a storm in the air. I should like to see it break.” 

But the sagacious Paturge had not that pleasure : loris did 
not wait for it. 

He left the house with Victor Louche, and left the old ivory 
lute on his mistress’s knee, and Guido Serravalle kneeling 
before her to tune it, with Mimo and Trillo on either side of 
her, like her tutelary twin deities as they were. 

“ lionsoulet,” said Madame Paturge as they went home, 
“ that will not last very long.” 

“ Will it not, my dear ?” said Ronsoulet ; and he sighed, for 
experience had taught him that liberty was hard to obtain. 

The next morning, while the day was still young, loris, in 
his own little room, taking his coffee, was confronted by an 
imperious and furious woman. A scene was his fate. 

What did he mean? How dared he? Where had he 
been ? What could he say ? 

The whirlwind broke over his head. The fierce gray eyes 
flashed like steel. The storm had lost nothing of its violence 
by having been pent up till noon. 

Irritated, annoyed, deafened, surprised, exasperated, he 
sought refuge in an untruth : he affected jealousy of the old 
ivory lute. 

It was a lie, but it imposed on her. It calmed the troubled 
waters of her soul. She believed, and, believing, consented 
to be pacified. 

So blinded by her credulous vanity was she that she omitted 
to notice that all the while he never told her where his evening 
had been spent. 


212 


FRIENDSHIP. 


CHAPTER XXVII. 

“ He was jealous of poor little Guido !” thought Lady Joan, 
with a flash of delight and amusement, an hour after the tem- 
pest, as she glanced in the mirror to see if her brow were 
smooth again and her dress uncrumpled, and hastened from 
the house of loris. 

On the threshold, with whom should an unkind fate bring 
her sharply in contact but Lord and Lady Norwich, ponderous 
and solemn, their footman behind them, walking feebly down 
the street to their carriage ! They had been to see a neigh- 
boring church which boasted a famous fresco. 

Lord and Lady Norwich looked a little stiff; Lady Joan for 
the moment a little blank. But it was just one of those 
moments which, like the meetings at the Paris cafes when 
without her bib and tucker, tested her savoir-faire, and never 
found her wanting. 

“ Oh, dear Lady Norwich,” she cried, with rapture, “ what 
a fortunate moment to meet you ! This is lo’s house. You 
know lo’s house ? Mr. Challoner brought you the other day 
to see his tapestries, didn’t he ?*’ (Lord and Lady Norwich, 
still stifliy, assented.) “ How I do wish you would come in 
again now ! Will you come in again now ? I’ve just been to 
see such a lovely old Francia he has found out right away in 
the mountains. It belongs to a poor old priest, a vicar of a 
miserable village, who is really almost starving, and never knew 
the worth of it till lo told him. Mr. Challoner and I have 
been enchanted with the picture. I’m afraid Robert’s just 
gone, and lo was already out, but I could show you this 
Francia if you would not mind coming up-stairs. You know 
I do as I like here. Poor dear lo ! he’s just like my brother. 
Could you spare me flve minutes?” 

Lord and Lady Norwich were thawing: they hesitated, 
mumbled that it was cold, but finally yielded ; she was so 
solicitous and so deferential that they consented to enter the 
house and to carry their venerable persons and their unim- 
peachable respectability and dignity up the staircase to see the 


FRIENDSHIP. 


213 


Francia, which was placed alone in its glory on an old oak 
easel in one of the entrance-chambers. 

“ Yery fine ; really very fine,” said Lord Norwich, and sat 
down before it. 

The Francia was a real Francia ; it had been in the family 
of loris for as many centuries as have gone by since the tender 
old painter looked with wet eyes on KaflTaelle’s panel that made 
him ashamed of the labors of his own long lifetime. There 
was no doubt about the Francia, which was a treasure and 
favorite with loris ; and the slow, torpid heart of Lord Norwich 
began to quicken with longing for it. 

“ Wasted in a village presbytery, — dear me ! dear me !” he 
said, and shook his head. He was an honorable man ; he said 
straight out that he would give the needy priest the just price 
for it, and named a large sum. 

“ I’m sure lo can get it for you for that,” said the Lady 
Joan. “I’m so soriy lo’s not home now. He was already 
gone out when I came in first. But I’ll tell him, and let you 
know this evening for certain.” 

“ Perhaps he may wish to buy it himself,” said Lord Nor- 
wich, — a scrupulous man, very delicate and hesitating under 
his pomposity. 

Lady Joan laughed. 

“ Poor dear lo ! Buy it ! He’ll have to sell his own pic- 
tures, more likely, I’m alraid. You know he’s so poor, though 
we try to keep things straight for him in the country. No, 
he let it hang here on the chance of finding a purchaser for 
the poor old vicario. He’ll be so delighted you have seen 
and fancied it. lo loves to do good. Dear Lady Norwich, 
are you cold on this marble floor ?” 

Lady Norwich began to think the rooms were cold: if Lord 
Norwich had seen enough of the picture she wished to go. 
This was precisely what Lady Joan wanted her to do. She 
was afraid every moment that loris would come out of his 
own little room, and she had no means of signalling to him to 
stay there shut up ; and though of course she could readily 
have explained his appearance on some hypothesis or another, 
still it was better to avoid it. So she suggested that the 
apartment was cold. 

“ lo is so little at home, you know : he is so much with 
us,” she said, frankly. 


214 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ As if she would say that, if there were anything between 
them!” thought Lady Norwich, and commented on the speech 
to this effect afterwards to her friends. So Lady Joan piloted 
them in safety down- stairs, and was offered a seat in their 
carriage, and took it, and drove home to luncheon with these 
great and excellent people, and having begun the morning 
with a scene, ended it with a success, like the truly clever 
woman she was. 

“ Not like to sell the Francia, lo !” she screamed, later in 
the day. “ But you must sell it 1 you shall sell it ! If I 
hadn’t sold it I should have been compromised for life. 
Would you dare to compromise me by telling these old asses 
the picture is yours ?” 

A gentleman cannot compromise a woman, even if she has 
just made him a stormy scene in an unasked visit to his own 
house. So loris, with an impatient and embittered heart, saw 
his Francia transferred to the Norwich collection. 

The purchase-money was a large sum indeed. 

“ It will set your poor priest at ease for his life, I hope,” 
said the kindly stupid purchaser, who liked to think people 
were comfortable through his means. 

loris bowed in silence. 

There was no poor priest to have the purchase-money ; but 
the Lady Joan shortly afterwards bought herself a rimlre of 
emeralds that was going cheap, and, from the Chemnitz sales, 
an old cabinet of the first matchless Boule. 


CHAPTER XXVIII. 

The gardens of the Colonna Palace are among the mosc 
charming things of Rome. When the iron gate clangs behind 
you and you climb the ilex-walk to them, you will ten to one 
be all alone. The gardens are just such gardens as Horace 
and Virgil used to move in ; you sit under the shattered pine 
planted to mark Rienzi’s death, and all the temples and towers 
of the immortal city lie beneath, and the pile of the Capitol 
soars upward near you, from the mass of roofs, like a cliff 
from out the sea ; the pigeons pace to and fro, the ducks push 


FRIENDSHIP. 


215 


their flat beaks among the grass, swallows skim by, oranges 
drop, the sound of the many trickling streams and fountains 
blends with the subdued murmur of the streets far down below. 
The world holds few sweeter or nobler places to dream in than 
these gardens of Rienzi’s foes. 

Etoile found them out, and often went across the piazza to 
them in the early morning or at the decline of day, with the 
great dog Tsar. 

One afternoon, having passed all the morning in the Vati- 
can galleries with Princess Vera, she entered the gardens to 
sit and watch the sun sink to his setting. As she sat there, 
with volumes of Giusti and of Leopardi on her lap, at which 
she had not even looked. Tsar rose and moved his tail in ani- 
mated welcome. She glanced downward through the shelving 
descent of ilex- and orange-leaves, and saw coming across 
from the palace by tlie little bridge that crosses the street the 
figure of loris. 

Tsar ran headlong down the winding walks and steps to 
meet him. He came up, caressing the dog, and approached 
Iier with uncovered head. 

“ I saw you from the gallery of the palace ; I could not 
resist ascending. I saw you were looking more at Rome than 
at your books. You love my city ?” 

“ Ah, what a commonplace ! That is only to say that I 
am not quite soulless.” 

“ Few care for Rome as you do.” 

“No? To be sure. Lady Joan says that it is as dirty as 
Cairo, as dear as Trouville, as ugly as Brighton, and as great 
an imposture as Athens. Tastes differ.” 

He gave an impatient gesture. 

“ Why must you always speak of her ? Let me forget that 
she exists for a moment.” 

Etoile looked at him a moment, then looked away. 

“ Do not say those things to me. They are not loyal.” 

“Loyal! Do slaves give loyalty? You have called me a 
slave.” 

She was silent. 

“ Can loyalty be enforced by cudgels and chains ? She 
thinks it can ; but it cannot.” 

“ Tell her so, then : not me.” 

Toris sighed impatiently. 


216 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Tell her ! How little you know her 1” he muttered. He 
thought of the fierce storms, the violent reproaches, the tem- 
pestuous outbursts, which avenged the slightest opposition to 
his tyrant’s will. 

All that men most dread, and which they have concentrated 
in the one all-eloquent word a “ scene,” she could pour out 
upon his head in any fatal hour that her whim was crossed or 
wrath excited. 

A woman’s violence is- a mighty power; before it reason 
recoils unnerved, justice quails appalled, and peace perishes 
like a burnt-up scroll ; it is a sand-storm, before which courage 
can do but little : the bravest man can but fall on his face and 
let it rage on above him. 

He walked to and fro, a moment or two, on the level path 
of the upper terrace, then very wearily rested his elbows on 
the wall and leaned there near her where she sat. 

It was a beautiful afternoon : the sun was still above the 
dusky lines of the pines of Monte Mario, far away in front, 
and the warm light tinted the soft, clear olive of his cheek 
and the delicate, proud outlines of his face. 

His face and figure lent themselves to the beauty of any 
scene. Standing on a reaped field, against the bare poles of 
the maize, in his white linen dress, with the warm sun about 
him, he had a poetic, supple, picturesque grace that Leopold 
Robert would have loved to perpetuate in a Roman sketch ; 
standing in a crowded presence-chamber, with orders hanging 
to his coat, and a sea of court ladies, laces, and feathers, and 
diamonds about him, in the wax-light, he had a grave, medi- 
tative dignity of beauty that Vandyke would have liked to 
render in a portrait which should have all the lordly sadness 
of his Charles Stuart in it. 

With loris all this was quite unconscious : hence its charm. 
Nature had made him so ; that was all. But his personal 
graces gave him an irresistible sway over women. This kind 
of power to charm is like a magician’s gift. 

Women shall honor great ability, shall behold true manliness, 
shall be worshipped with knightly reverence, shall be assailed 
by all the splendor of intellect, shall be wooed with all daring 
and all humility, and yet shall remain cold, and as untouched, 
as marble in the quarry. And then there shall come one who 
has this magic gift, — this wand that wakes the sleeping senses. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


217 


this rose that, slipped into the bosom, banishes all peace, 
this power of love incarnated, — and though the magician be 
faithless as the wind, and rootless as the wind-born flower, 
yet in him alone forever shall be her heaven and her hell. 

“ What a life is mine !” he said impetuously now, after a 
long silence. “ The life of a lackey I You described it well 
that day at Fiordelisa. No will of my own ; no time of my 
own ; ordered here, ordered there ; dragging through the same 
endless and joyless routine. The lackey has more liberty than 
I, for he at least stipulates for some few hours of freedom. 
What future can I look forward to ? I dare not look forward ; 
a dead blank faces me, — faces me everywhere. With no home, 
with no interest, with no children, with no hope, is it worth 
while living ? At times I envy the very mnles that creep past 
me with their loads : they are less sensible of the weight they 
bear than I am.” 

Etoile looked at him and felt a pang at her own heart, half 
of pity, half of pain. She could not doubt the sincerity of 
this passionate lament. 

“ But your friendship ” she murmured, and then paused, 

with the color in her face. 

It was not friendship that thus dragged upon his life. She 
felt ashamed to speak the sorry lie Society allows and loves. 

loris, with one of his swift changes of mood, and uneasily 
conscious that he had betrayed himself too far, turned and 
laughed carelessly. 

“ Friendship ! Ah, yes 1 Friendship means anything, — 
everything, — from deadliest hate and hottest love downward to 
the zero of complete indifference ! There is only Tsar, I think, 
who really gives one the honest friendship of a by-gone day.” 

He drew the dog to him and caressed him, and sank down 
on the bench beside her, and talked of Leopardi, whom he 
had known when he himself had been a little child, and 
together they watched the pile of the Capitol grow dark and 
the sun descend behind the purples of the pines; together 
they left the gardens, that grew drear and cold when once 
the sun had set, and passed across the square in the fleeting 
twilight. 

At her door he bade her adieu, and with a heavy heart and 
a reluctant step went slowly back to the house which stood to 
him in the stead of home, — a bastard home, warmed with the 
K 19 


218 


FRIENDSHIP. 


dull fires of a worn-out passion : he felt a great reluctance to 
enter, an utter weariness of all he would encounter. 

Day after day, night after night, the comedy was always 
the same. The curt command, the hard contempt, the com- 
mercial discussion, the sensual gaze, the trite caress, the hollow 
ecstasy, — he knew them all, one after another, so well, so 
horribly well. His heart failed him as he mounted the long 
stone staircase and entered the familiar atmosphere, haunted 
with stale smoke and stirred by the twang of the mandolin. 

He hated the scent ; he hated the sounds. They were all 
fraught to him with the sickliness of an enforced habit, of a 
perpetual repetition. Shining eyes flashing through tobacco- 
mist over a ribboned guitar may be intoxicating for six hours, 
six weeks, even six months. But for six years ! . . . 

In six years the laugh palls, the songs jar, the eyes repel. 

A sense of dulness and jaded effort fell on him always now 
whenever he crossed the threshold of that too terribly well- 
known room. The deadly apathy of a familiarity that is not 
hallowed by any sense of sanctity or sweetness fell on him 
heavy as lead whenever he entered her dwelling. He knew 
all that would be said and done, all that would be expected and 
exacted : it had no more interest for him than a comedy that 
has run three hundred nights has for the stall-keepers. 

A woman need never dread the fiercest quarrel with her 
lover: the tempest may bring sweeter weather than any it 
broke up, and after the thunder the singing of birds will sound 
lovelier than before. Anger will not extinguish love, nor will 
scorn trample it dead ; jealousy will fan its fires, and offences 
against it may but fasten closer its fetters that it adores beyond 
all liberty. But when love dies of a worn-out familiarity it 
perishes for ever and aye. 

Jaded, disenchanted, wearied, indifferent, the tired passion 
expires of sheer listlessness and contemptuous disillusion. 

The death is slow and unperceived, but it is sure ; and it 
is a death that has no resurrection. 

This was how the passion which the Lady Joan desired to 
cudgel into immortality was dying now. 

When he entered the Turkish room this afternoon he found 
her the centre of an adoring circle of half a dozen youths, 
with the white-haired Silverly Bell and the very dear old 
Mimo as more solid ballast. She was surrounded by sketches 


FRIENDSHIP. 


219 


of costumes, Eastern stuffs, strings of sequins, and damascened 
weapons, and was discussing her own and her companions’ 
attire at a fancy ball to be given by the Echeances. 

“How late you are, lo! Where have you been all this 
time?” she said, in greeting, a heavy frown upon her brows. 

“ With the King of Denmark,” answered loris. 

“ Wkat ? Why, Almeria’s in attendance on him.” 

“ Almeria is indisposed. They sent for me.” 

Lady Joan looked at him sharply. She had a vague sus- 
picion that there was something withheld from her. 

“ Where did the king go ?” she pursued, being possessed 
with the common feminine belief that catechisms produce 
truth as their results. 

“ To the galleries,” answered loris. 

“ Will he buy while he’s here?” said the Lady Joan, her 
thoughts reverting to business and her eyes to Burletta. 

loris shrugged his shoulders. 

“ I really cannot say.” 

Then he took up the day’s “ Fanfulla” and sat down near 
the window, whilst she returned to her costumes and her 
courtiers, and put on her yashmaks, and rattled her tambou- 
rines, and screamed at the youths’ jokes and smiled on their 
homage, and petted her dear old friends Silverly and Mimo 
so cleverly that neither was envious of the other. 

“ How different it is with her !” he mused, with a sigh, to 
himself. 

Etoile had become “her” in his thoughts. 

“ You’re as grave as an owl, lo,” cried the Lady Joan, 
snapping her fingers in his face as six o’clock sounded, and 
she dismissed her slaves, and threw the windows open to let 
the cigar-smoke out, since the Dean of St. Edmund’s and 
the Lady Barbara, his wife, were going to dine with her, 
and other eminent respectabilities were to meet them ; and 
her well-trained servant was already clearing away the French 
songs, and the cigar-ash, and the costumes, and the tambourines, 
and laying out in their stead grave English journals and reports 
of Academies of Art and Science. 

She was careful to give many dinners, and good ones. She 
knew that money laid out on plovers’ eggs and truffles, green 
peas in winter, and salmon from the North, sherries from the 
Xerxes plains, and clarets from the Garonne’s banks, will 


220 


FRIENDSHIP. 


bring forth high interest in the shape of -much long-suffering 
from a propitiated, and by consequence pardoning, Society. 

She had never read the “ Satyricon,” and perhaps never 
heard of it, but she acted on the principle inculcated by the 
priestess ^nothea. In this age, as in that, two broad gold 
pieces, provided they be big enough, will buy the right to 
kill the sacred goose of the temple and even to cook it too. 

The world is like aged ^nothea. 

“ Slay the divine bird ! oh, vilest sinner !” she cried, and 
banged her trencher down in ruthless rain of blows ; but, soft- 
ening at the sight of a well-filled hand, she relented. “ Nay, 
sweet youth, it was but in love and fear for thee I scolded. 
Nay, I promise thee, surely it shall be known to none. 
And since the bird is dead it were of no avail to avenge it ; 
I will strip it in thine honor, and we will make merry over 
its baked meats !” 

Society has not changed much since the “ Satyricon.” It 
has invented prettier names for the old vices, — that is all. 

loris now moved from her touch with that petulance which 
took in him the charm of a woman’s grace and a woman’s 

mia ! One does not feel flattered when you 
take such ardent interest in young lads of twenty that can 
warble a cafe ballad ; and, as you only reproach me when I 
come here, and amuse yourself with others, why should I 
endeavor to be anything but grave?” 

She did not know the secret of the impatience which moved 
him, the comparison with the thoughts and ways of another 
woman that he instituted to her own loss in his own medita- 
tions. She believed that he was angered at her attention to 
the young men, as he had been angry at the ivory lute, and 
such anger argued jealousy, and jealousy had been very quiet 
in him for some years. She was delighted at its revival. 

“ What a goose you are ! Go home and dress,” she cried 
gayly to him as she disappeared into her own chamber. He 
caught her hand and detained her a moment. 

“ Who dines with you to-night? I forget.” 

“Oh, a heap of great people. Bores of the flrst water. 
Just the folks that always make me want to dance the Cancan 
in their faces and make the seventh heaven of Mr. Challoner.” 

“ You have not asked — the Comtesse d’Avesnes ?” 


“ Carissima 


FRIENDSHIP. 


221 


“ Etoile ! My dear To ! Are you mad ? What, ask a 
Paris Sappho to meet the Bean of St. Edmund’s and the 
Countess of Norwich ! When will you understand the de- 
corum of the inviolate isle of fogs and fogies ?” 

And the Lady Joan went into her dressing-room with a 
laugh and shut the door, to glance over the London reviews 
on the Dean’s learned study of the “ Use and Import of the 
Letter Koph.” 

loris went out, and down the stairs thoughtfully. He was 
not at ease : he felt as if he had heard a blasphemy, and had 
let it pass, unrebuked, out of cowardice. 

Lady Joan, her study of the letter Koph completed, went 
to her toilet in a contented and radiant mood, and had her 
velvet dress put on, and ran a gilt spadella through her dark 
braids, and clasped a gilt waist-belt round her, and saw that 
she looked very well. 

“ He was actually jealous of those nice boys ! What fun 
it is ! Poor lo !” she thought to herself, with that complacent 
pity for the sufferer from her own fascinations which is the 
greatest enjoyment of a very vain woman. She was enraptured 
to think that the old folly was in him still, and she was in 
happy ignorance of the workings of his thoughts. 

He was jealous ! She smiled at herself in the glass with 
perfect satisfaction. After six years he was still jealous ! 

He was jealous, — poor lo ! 

Lady Joan smiled at herself, thinking of Abana and Phar- 
par, Orontes and Euphrates, and so in perfect good humor 
went into her drawing-room, to form a domestic picture on the 
hearth-rug with her husband and child by the time that Lord 
and Lady Norwich and the Dean of St. Edmund’s and his 
wife entered, coming all together from the Hotel des lies 
Britanniques. 

She was on such good terms with herself that she behaved 
with admirable composure throughout five hours of dreary 
and dignified platitudes, and enraptured the Dean with her 
sound views of the dangers of Christianity from the Greek 
Church, and thanked Lady Barbara with effusion for a 
promised recipe for knitting children’s woollen stockings. 

“ We have only one treasure, you know,” said Lady Joan, 
with her warmest smile, “ and I like to fancy she wears any- 
thing of my own making when I can !” 

19 * 


222 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“Such a natural sentiment!” rejoined the Dean’s wife, 
quite touched. She had left sons and daughters of all ages 
in the monastic shades of St. Edmund’s, and worshipped 
them. 

“ What an excellent young woman that is, my dear !” said 
Lady Barbara to the Dean as they drove home to their hotel. 
“ And such a devoted mother too, evidently.” 

“ A vastly agreeable woman,” murmured the Dean, in tones 
as soft and thick as the tUe de cn'tme he had been drinking. 
“ Good common sense in her, — no superficiality : her remarks 
about my pamphlet were really astonishingly clever. Quite a 
deep knowledge for a woman. A very bad marriage she made; 
a very bad marriage. I remember wondering at it at the time. 
But it seems to have turned out remarkably well, — house nicely 
appointed, — nice dinner : that sturgeon was particularly well 
done.” 

“ And Mr. Challoner such a good creature.” 

“ Sensible man. Something in the East, wasn’t he? Consul 
— carpets — something that began with a C, I know. Asked 
me to go with him to see a Gentile da Fabriano that is to be 
had as a wonderful bargain.” 

“ Oh, yes : she told me about it. It belongs to that striking- 
looking man that sat quite silent at dinner, an Italian, a great 
friend of theirs : he’d been with the King of Denmark all'day ; 
and I fancy he’s very poor, by what she said, — that it would 
be a charity.” 

“ Ah ! the Italians always are as poor as church rats. Cer- 
tainly let us go and see it. I always admire Gentile and all 
that school of Early Upper Italy. They are very kind people, 
evidently, — excellent people.” 

So the Dean of St. Edmund’s droned himself into a doze, 
and was ready whenever he should go back to his cloister to 
vow in society everywhere that by all his clerical dignity Joan 
Challoner was the most estimable of her sex ; and his wife 
was ready to second him. 

Thus just by reading about the letter Koph for ten minutes, 
and by begging a recipe to knit woollen stockings, she secured 
champions in the Church of England, and sold a picture next 
day at a net profit of three hundred pounds. 

“ Have I a soul?” said Voltaire’s peacock. “ Certainly I 
have: look at my tail.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


223 


Lady Joan would have said, “ Certaioly I have: look at my 
card-basket and my bargains.” 

“ You were very stupid to-night, lo,” she said, roughly, 
when the Dean and his lady were fairly away, and loris re- 
mained alone with her, with the lamps burning low, “ You 
were very stupid to-night,” she said, giving a twist to the silver- 
gilt spilla in her coiled hair, 

“ I have a headache, carissima mia." 

Lady Joan looked dubiously at him. 

“ You’re always having headaches now.” 

“ And you do not pity me ?” 

“ I wish you wouldn’t always have ’em just when my 
friends dine here,” she said, ungi*aciously. “ You’re always 
well enough when that woman’s here.” 

“ What woman ?” 

• “ As if you didn’t know ! You’re twice as civil to her as 
you need be. Marjory’s noticed it, I can tell you. Oh, don’t 
look so innocent. You’re always after Etoile. You know you 
are. 

“ Mais^ ma chlre f You always see me courteous, I hope, 
to all your sex.” 

“ All my fiddlesticks ! Courteous, indeed ! You’re much 
more than courteous, — talking to her all night, going away 
when she goes away, sitting staring at her as if she were some- 
thing new-fallen from heaven.” 

“ Mats, ma chh'e ? What exaggeration ! I told you the 
first night we saw her that she did not even please me, — that 
she was insolent, and was cold ; she is lost in her art ; she does 
not perceive that such mere mortals as myself exist.” 

“ You try to show her you exist, at any rate. Marjory saw 
you walking with her this very day in the Colonna gardens.” 

“ La bonne Marjory must want to make mischief. I came 
up from calling on Marc’ Antonio by the gardens to make a 
short cut, and she was there : it was the purest accident.” 

“Humph !” Lady Joan was a woman of experience, and 
did not believe in accidents between men and women. 

“ Do not let us quarrel about nothing,” he said, rousing 
himself and altering the twist of the gilded spilla. “ She is 
no woman to me. If I look at her at all, it is merely as one 
would look at old Grill parzer at Vienna, or Wagner at Bai- 
reuth, — for the sake of what she has done. When a woman 


224 


FRIENDSHIP. 


has entered a public arena she is half unsexed. You know 
what I think of notoriety for your sex.” 

His heart smote him as he spoke, as though he uttered a 
blasphemy against the saints of his childish faith. But he 
did speak with an admirable carelessness and contempt com- 
bined which carried conviction to his hearer’s ear. 

Lady Joan liked to be persuaded that she had voluntarily 
abstained from being a celebrity, as Richelieu liked to be per- 
suaded that he had voluntarily abstained from being a poet. 
Besides, she was always easily lulled into complacent serenity. 
A very vain woman is easily deceived, because it seems impos- 
sible to her that any one can ever be preferred to herself. 

He played with the spilla in her hair and leaned over her 
in the mellow lamplight. She looked up into his amorous 
eyes, and was content ; the lustre in them was dim to what 
she had once seen there, and the fire spent, yet he knew how 
to make their dreamy depths tell the tale she had heard ten 
thousand times and never tired of : it was only acting now, 
but it was acting so perfect that she lived its dupe in happy 
blindness. Keen and shrewd and hard of temper though she 
was, here she was duped as utterly as the softest and silliest of 
her sex. 

Though very clever in many ways, one thing in her was 
stronger than her cleverness, and that was vanity. 

A very trustful woman believes in her lover’s fidelity with 
her heart ; a very vain woman believes in it with her head. 

To Lady Joan it would have seemed more possible for the 
stars to fall from the sky than for any man to desert her. 

In passion for him she was as reasonless and as sightless 
as any Juliet or Gretchen lying for the first moment in her 
lover’s arms. The years had blown low the flame in him, but 
in her they had only fanned it to a fiercer strength. The 
ridicule of him, the command of him, the oppression and the 
tyranny and the suspicion of him, were only her way of 
showing power, only her device for making her world be- 
lieve the thing she wished. Alone with him, love intoxicated, 
drugged, subdued her ; alone with him, she was only an eager, 
passionate, voluptuous mistress ; alone with him, she was only 
Cleopatra, — the Dame du Comptoir was dead. 

loris was in everything the superior of his tyrant. 

In intelligence, in taste, in culture, in disposition, he was 


FRIENDSHIP. 


225 


alike far beyond her. Yet, by a coarse, rough energy which 
swept before it his hesitating temperament, and by a sensual, 
fierce passion which his soft nature recoiled from conflict with, 
she had obtained a dominion over him which he had ceased 
even to think of contesting. The women who love men truly 
never obtain this power : they love too well to watch the 
occasion to seize it. The old proverb that, between two, one 
is always booted and spurred, the other always saddled and 
bridled, is as true as proverbs always are, which are “ the dis- 
tilled drops of the experience of nations.” It is not superi- 
ority of mind, or of character, or of person, that determines 
which shall ride and which shall be ridden ; it is generally 
rather the result of a certain hardness of temper which de- 
termines the question early in the day and never loses the 
supremacy. Taken roughly it may be safely predicted that it 
will always be the highest nature which will submit. Often 
it is the jade that rules the hero, the fool that has feet kissed 
by the genius. 

The very fierceness and force and fire of this woman, which 
had at first intoxicated him, served now at once to repel and 
to intimidate him. 

From the stern eyes, from the imperious voice, from the 
vigorous gestures, from the resolute will that had once fasci- 
nated him by their sheer strength which swept his softer nature 
away on it as a mountain-torrent sweeps a tree, he had little by 
little grown to recoil in the inevitable reaction of all purely 
animal passion. Her heel was set on his throat. Once he 
had kissed the foot that so degraded him. But little by 
little he had begun to breathe laboredly under its oppression. 
Little by little the desire to raise it and rise had come to him. 
He was tired of his life. 

Tired of the orders and counter-orders, of the buying and 
selling, of the petty hypocrisies, of the puerile aims, of the ex- 
actions that compelled him to follow like her shadow her path 
through society, of the obligation to show himself wheresoever 
she might choose to go in that continual attendance which 
is a rapture when voluntary from passion, a deathly fatigue 
when imposed from habit, — he was like a prisoner who drags a 
cannon-ball at his ankle. 

Night after night, as he dressed to go through the social 
comedy whose every speech and gesture he knew beforehand, 

K* 


226 


FRIENDSHIP. 


he sighed, impatient to be free ; and yet he went. Habit is 
an ever-lengthening chain whose links get heavier with each 
added ring. 

With her their love was still alive, an ever-burning fire, 
irresistible and insatiable in its hours of abandonment. With 
him their love was dead and was replaced by habit. 

It is a terrible difference. 

Letting himself out of her house in the cold rosy dawn, he 
shuddered, not with the physical chill of the wintry night, but 
at the vision of his own future. 

“ This woman always !” 

So he thought every morning, yet every night he went back 
to her, as the mill-horse to its yoke. She was not faithful to 
him, because such women as she know not fidelity. She was 
not truthful to him, because truth was not in her and could 
not find its home in her mouth. She was the ruin of his life, 
whilst she declared herself his salvation. Her tyranny, her 
exactions, her ridicule, and her overwhelming egotism cast 
into the cold shade of men’s scorn the man whom she delighted 
to oppress and wound, as a child loves to hurt the pet that it 
hugs to its bosom. His idiosyncrasies were lost under her in- 
ordinate vanities, and her obtrusive personalities drove him to 
the refuge of silence and self-repression. He passed his life 
like a tree under the shadow of a high wall : only the wall 
had been built up brick and brick, so that he had never noticed 
it till it was forever there between him and the sun. 

She herself was in love still, — with that terrible and untiring 
passion which can exist in a woman who to masculine vigor 
unites feminine caprice. 

She delighted to make him subservient, to render him ab- 
surd, to deny him any will of his own, to ridicule his words, 
to mock at him before the world. But this was the result 
only of her natural temper. It was only as she beat a dog, or 
punished a child, or tyrannized over whatever lay at her mercy. 
Besides, she thought that it imposed on her society; she 
thought that it veiled her own passion for him, which was 
strong and fierce and keen, which begrudged a glance or a 
smile from him elsewhere, which took a voluptuous delight in 
his person, in his touch. But in his presence, in his regard, 
in his caress, there was still intoxication for her ; she would 
have seen him dead sooner than given to another ; her passion 


FRIENDSHIP. 


227 


was violent, faithless, cruel, ignoble, but it was passion, and it 
was living still, — a restless sea of fire that beat itself upon the 
cold ashes of his own dead desires till it warmed them to a 
semblance of itself. 

Once he had felt as tiger-tamers feel, and the very danger 
that there was in the creature he caressed had served to en- 
thrall him. Little by little the reality of the tigress temper 
had become visible to him, and its greed and hardness and 
predatory instincts were revealed. This queen of the desert 
that laid her soft cheek against his was, after all, only a cat 
that growled. Little by little the sense stole on him that his 
arms held what preyed on him, — and would devour him. 

But when he awoke to his own peril it was too late ; the 
tamed tigress had sprung and mastered him. 


CHAPTER XIX. 

Cleopatra after sunset, the Lady Joan rose nevertheless 
every morning Dame du Comptoir to the tips of her fingers. 
Eventide might be for the mandolin or the mask, and the 
tender passions and the fierce ones, but noonday was none the 
less for business. 

Her forenoons were sternly given to those commercial con- 
siderations for which she had brought a leaning from the banks 
of Abana and Pharpar, Orontes and Euphrates. Telegrams 
and letters about her various speculations and gigantic com- 
mercial transactions scarcely let her swallow her breakfast in 
comfort ; and, these attended to, there were the teacups and 
triptychs, the pots and the pans of her excellent friends and 
brothers Mimo and Trillo ; china to be packed, canvases to be 
backed, and all the minutiae to be attended to of that sublime 
mission of the diffusion of Art which she had set herself as 
her object in life, only secondary to the Berkshire pigs and the 
Brahma poultry and the general salvation of Fiordelisa. 

Mimo and Trillo were the very Dioscuri of Art; twin 
Tyndarids of connoisseurship and commerce ; Gemini of 
genius who were both unspeakably dear to her ; though plump 
Mimo bore off the palm as far as being petted by her went, 


228 


FRIENDSHIP. 


and was by far the more enthusiastic in her praises. Accord- 
ing to him she was angelic, heroic, unequalled, far above all 
the mortal weaknesses of her sex, and only possessing one 
little, little, little fault, — that of being so unnaturally and 
superhumanly perfect that she was incapable of conceiving 
that a base-minded world could ever put incorrect constructions 
on her noble actions. 

“ Poverina ! Certainly she compromises herself ; alas ! she 
does compromise herself ; but it is only the boldness of inno- 
cence!” said Mimo, with a bit of cracked Limoges in his hand 
and a big cigar in his mouth. 

“ It was the boldness of innocence.” It cost the good fellow 
no more to say so than it did to say that any one of his round 
plates, painted and baked by a living workman in a cellar in 
the Trastevere, was pure Gubbio ware, with the iridescent 
hues colored by Maestro Giorgio himself. 

“ It was the boldness of innocence.” 

The phrase tickled the fancy of Mimo very much, and was 
forever ready on his tongue, as ^'■Antico — proprio anticoV^ 
was forever on it before any doubtful plaque of repovssS work 
or any quattrocentista bridal coffer that had been carved and 
gilded the week before. “ It was the boldness of innocence.” 
After all, if the phrase pleased her so much, it cost him very 
little to say it ; and what mortal man would not learn it by 
heart, when, just for saying it, you get a cosy sofa to lounge 
in, and a nice little dinner to eat, and a handsome woman to 
pet you? 

Besides, “ the boldness of innocence” is like the reputation 
for oddity ; once accorded, it is as elastic as india-rubber and 
as comprehensive as the umbrellas of the kings of the East, 
which would shelter three hundred men. There is nothing 
you cannot explain away with it ; before it Juvenal himself 
would be obliged to make his bow and retire quite satisfied. 

Trillo was somewhat more austere, and had not the com- 
fortable roundness as of a child’s tumbler or an Indian god 
which characterized Mimo ; he was also more astute, and could 
never be brought to rhapsodize as Mimo would do over the 
Berkshire pigs and the Minerva who had imported them. 
Trillo went in for high art, found marvellous Baffaelles and 
Luca della Robbias in old cellars and old walls, and, though 
occasionally to oblige he would condescend to furniture, he 


FRIENDSHIP, 


229 


would never run about and find old chairs for you, as Mimo 
would do any day of his life. Trillo had only a studio, and 
never had anything else, whereas Mimo, if you were buying a 
good deal of him, did not so much mind your calling his cham- 
bers a shop. But this unbending austerity of Trillo made him, 
perhaps, the more useful of the two in the main. Trillo even 
impressed the great Hebrides family, and found them a stove 
painted by Hirschvogel when that master stayed and worked 
in Venice, and an altar-screen in ivory carved by Desiderio, 
before which all South Kensington subsequently went on its 
knees. He had been, indeed, so fortunate as to find these 
exact works of art three years before for Prince Kouramasine, 
who had borne them off to his castle in White Russia ; but 
White Russia and Ben Nevis are far-asundered ; and the de- 
signs were so beautiful that it was not extraordinary that both 
Hirschvogel and Desiderio should have been so enamored of 
them as to have executed them twice. 

Both Mimo and Trillo, who were men of judgment, suffered 
many things from the ignorance of their Minerva. She would 
confuse styles and orders, jumble up schools and epochs, call 
Turin Arazzi Gobelin, and Frankenthal china Worcester; 
attribute a Dutch ivory to Alessandro Algardi, and a post- 
Renaissance painting to Spinello or Francia ; and they would 
shiver when these mistakes were made before folks that knew, 
and would groan together in secret. 

But these were trifles, after all, — there were so very few 
folks that knew ; and their Minerva was invaluable to them, 
and they sat at her feet solemn as the owl of her emblem, 
whenever the great Scotch cousins came with her, or the 
much-enduring British tourist was brought in her train. In- 
deed, in one sense her ignorance was advantageous : it looked 
so frank. 

In fact, her very blunders became useful. 

Trillo would pull his beard and sigh that the dear and noble 
lady had such wonderful natural intelligence that she had never 
been brought to correct it by study. She had too much 
good faith, too ; she fell a prey to designing persons ; and 
Trillo pulled his beard, and sighed again, and confessed that a 
good deal the dear and noble lady had in her house was ro- 
haccia ^ — all sheer rohaccia ! She had been imposed on ; she 
was always imposed on when he and Mimo were not by ; she 


230 


FRIENDSHIP. 


had a few real gems, — ^yes, a few real gems, — Mimo and he 

had secured them for her ; but as for the rest I Now, 

mutual admiration societies answer well ; but mutual deprecia- 
tion societies answer, perhaps, still better. The former is a 
gilded screen that may soon fall to pieces ; but the latter is 
an impenetrable haze, such as hid Jove from mortal eyes 
profane. 

The tried partnership between the Temple of all the Virtues 
and Mimo and Trillo had never been signed or sealed, — nay, 
had never even been whispered, — but it served its purpose 
admirably. 

AVhen people took tea and a mufl&n in the Temple they did 
not see the fine wires connecting it with the shop and the 
studio ; and when they went to the shop and the studio they 
did not discern the metaphorical telephone by which shop and 
studio took counsel with the Temple. But nevertheless the 
impalpable lines were there ; and Mimo and Trillo, who were 
the Owl and the .^gis of Minerva, naturally absorbed much 
of Minerva’s attention, especially when there came any mighty 
cousins wanting teacups and triptychs, or an Esthetic Dean 
or a Ritualistic Rector with a pretty taste in the way of carved 
choir-seats or ornamented vestments. 

So that in one way or another she was always very busy. 

The practical half of her temperament which Voightel had 
called the dame du comptoir was filled with a multiplicity of 
objects and interests, from new people to conciliate to old china 
to sell, from bargains to be disposed of to balls to get invited to, 
from companies to be floated to visiting-cards to be left; and this 
harassing and multitudinous minutiae of interests so absorbed 
her at times that she actually forgot to watch loris, and left 
him a certain slender enjoyment of personal liberty of which 
he was quick to avail himself to the utmost. 

Prudence at times required that she should call on people* 
with no escort but Mr. Challoner’s ; business at times required 
that she should rummage amidst old lumber-shops with Bur- 
letta as her guardian and guide ; her own pleasure at times 
required that she should disport herself at theatres or in Cam- 
pagna rides with Douglas Graeme or young Guido Serravalle. 
Occasionally, too, there would pass through Rome some old 
friend of the camping-out days of the Desert, of whom it was 
not judicious to allow loris to see too much, since loris had 


FRIENDSHIP. 


231 


queer fancies, and among them was one that she had been a 
stranger to Eros and Anteros till he met her. Men will have 
these notions, — pure vanity, no doubt, — but it is never worth 
while to disturb them. 

So thus — here and there — he gained his morning or even- 
ing of freedom ; and whenever such a release came to him he 
hesitated never now as to how he should spend it, but wended 
his way to the old house by the Rospigliosi garden, and made 
friends with Tsar, and sat in the dreamy fragrance of Etoile’s 
narcissi and winter roses. 

Very clever as both the Lady Joan and Maijory Scrope 
were in their several manners, and experienced as the latter 
certainly was in masculine ways and wiles, to neither of them 
did it occur to remember, in their observations of loris, two 
things. 

First, that human nature yearns for freedom. 

Secondly, that human nature has a tendency towards that 
which is forbidden. 

When they set themselves in their several modes to watch 
him and were convinced that they succeeded in learning all 
his actions, they never took into account that men are like 
school-children, and cannot by any amount of spying be 
hindered from wholly following their bent, and will only be 
driven into devices for concealing it. 

The real temper of loris, the amorous but reticent, impas- 
sioned yet impassive temperament of his nationality, had been 
long lost sight of under the dulling influence of a galling routine. 
The semi-conjugal character of his position in the Casa Chal- 
loner and at Fiordelisa had long taken all savor of intrigue 
out of it : it was impossible to cheat himself into thinking he 
was climbing an escalier dirohe when Mr. Challoner welcomed 
him so blandly up the grand staircase ; his life had long lost 
the supreme charm of life : it had lost all possibility of the 
unforeseen arriving in it. Rising in the morning he knew all 
the routine of the coming twenty-four hours as well as he 
knew the numerals on the clock’s face, which would tell them 
as they passed. 

In her intense eagerness to absorb him completely, she had 
overshot her mark ; she had washed out of his life all expect- 
ation and all desire. She had made it a mere sand-plain, 
monotonous and arid, with her own figure looming perpetually 


232 


FRIENDSHIP. 


in mirage on its horizon, till turn where he would he could see 
nothing else. 

When the charm of a new interest, the mystery of a 
character he did not comprehend, the attraction of a woman 
unlike any that he had ever known, — when all these fell in 
his path he gave way to the impulse that moved him to pursue 
them with hardly more thought at first than a child has as it 
runs down a by-path to see nearer a butterfly on the wing. 

“ Vous Vavez voulu V he would have said to the woman 
who had sought to blind his eyes and bind his fancies. She 
had done it herself : the slave’s life into which she had en- 
chained him had made the slave’s instincts awake in him, — 
the instincts to hide and to escape. 

He had fallen into an utterly cheerless routine of existence, 
to which he was only reconciled by the sort of ferocious seduc- 
tion that she still possessed for him ; but when the eyes of 
Etoile first met his they had awakened the dormant romance 
and the forgotten dreams of his youth. 

It became sweet to him to have thoughts that his tyrant 
could not divine, sympathies that she could not reach, happy 
hours that she could not mar ; and at first he merely concealed 
the frequency of his visits to Etoile as he concealed every 
better emotion that he felt from his mistress. As it was, she 
never suspected them. 

In the forenoons that she gave to Mimo and Trillo, and to 
business generally, she seldom ordered or expected his attend- 
ance, and most of those forenoons found him % Etoile’s hearth, 
sitting in the fragrance of her heliotropes and hyacinths. 
When Lady Joan questioned him as to his morning he would 
say he had been at the Court or the Vatican, at the studios or 
the stables, and she was content. 

To loris, who had much of the artist and something of the 
poet, and who might say, like Camors, of his imagination, 
J'en ai^ maisje VetouffeJ' there was a pure and fresh pleas- 
ure in roaming over Rome with Etoile. 

Accustomed for years to a woman who ransacked all art only 
to get something to buy cheap and sell dear, and who regarded 
a picture or a bust only with an eye as to what it would fetch 
in ten years’ time, he found a new delight in the culture and 
fancy of a woman to whom every stone had a story and every 
statue was a living friend. When he went with Etoile and 


FRIENDSHIP. 233 

stood before the Faun of the Capitol he saw that she grew 
very pale and was quite silent. 

“ What do you feel ?” he asked her. 

After a little while she answered him what she did feel and 
what with her was truth. 

“ I can hardly tell you. I have thought of all these marbles 
so long that really to see them seems stranger than a dream. 
The Faun is the very incarnation of the youth of the world. 
Three thousand years have passed since he was called to shape, 
and he smiles as if he had been called out from the white rock 
but yesterday. Yet so many creeds have changed, and so many 
empires fallen, and so many cities perished, since he saw the 
light ! — the Apollo again, he should not be the god of any art, 
for all art changes ; he is the god of nature, the god eternal, 
the god of the flowers that grew out of Caesar’s ashes, and the 
sea that smiles though it drowned Shelley, and the sun that 
shines on while nations perish.” 

loris, standing by her, thought of another woman who, 
coming there for the first time also, had made a wry flice at 
the Apollo and snapped her fingers at him, and called this 
glory of the Belvedere a moonstruck posture-master, and this 
Faun of the Capitol a jolly little rogue, but had said she never 
could see what anybody found in stone dolls to rave about. 
He had dwelt with the lower and coarser intelligence till he 
had got used to it, but it had never altogether ceased to jar 
on him. The finer and more spiritual impulses in him re- 
vived and sprang up eagerly to meet the purer atmosphere of 
Etoile’s fancies, as pressed-down reeds spring up to meet the 
breeze. 

Meditation and fancy were with her the very sap of life, 
pervading her from root to branch, as its sap a tree ; with him 
they were but the utmost crown of leaf that fluttered in the 
wind, and was put forth, or frozen back, according to the air 
around. Yet there was likeness enough in them to give sym- 
pathy, and whilst he was with her he thought and saw and 
spoke as she did, — and was true in it. 

He also met Etoile at one or two great houses, embassies, 
and palaces, where the Lady Joan did not penetrate, and where 
she permitted him to go, because she always hoped, some day 
or other, to squeeze herself in by his means. 

When his tyrant was near, her boisterous self-assertion 
20 * 


234 


FRIENDSHIP. 


completely subdued him ; her incessant watchfulness made him 
constrained ; and, annoyed by her persistent claims on his 
attention, yet afraid to resist them, he had grown into the 
habit of a silent self-effacement in sheer self-defence. 

Away from her he was transformed, and all the grace, talent, 
and social gifts natural to him had their play. Nature had 
bestowed on him a graceful and dignified presence, a face that 
attracted the eyes of all women, and that happy tact and 
charm of manner which in society outweigh all accomplish- 
ment and achievement. 

He would have looked well in a panel of Giorgione’s or a 
canvas of Vandyke’s, and his grace and bearing went fittingly 
with these grave old palaces of Rome, where the motley of 
modern society almost gathers the grace of a dead day by 
the spell of its surroundings, in the solemn beauty of galleries 
that Raffaelle painted, and the gorgeous vastness of halls that 
Michael Angelo built. 

Etoile had looked at him at first as she would have done at 
a portrait or a statue ; then the portrait smiled, the statue 
spoke ; he lingered beside her in those noble galleries, where 
the genius of the past gazed down on the frivolity of the 
present; when she was occupied by others he stood near, 
mute and listening ; when he was there he was her shadow ; 
when he was not there she missed him. 

Etoile, from the years when she had pored over Shakspeare 
and Racine and Goethe in the woodland shadows of her tran- 
quil Ardennes, had had no passion save for her art ; though 
it was not likely that the world in general was going to be so 
simple as to believe this. It is seldom that the world is simple 
enough to receive a truth. “ I am Truth, and have few 
acquaintances,” says the gentleman in Congreve’s comedy : 
when he comes in, most people look the other way. 

Etoile in every fibre of her mind and temper was an artist. 
The artist quite absorbed and extinguished the woman in her. 
Men thought her — because they found her — cold. They 
paid her court and wooed her in all kinds of ways, but they 
all left her unmoved. 

Sometimes she would watch two lovers gliding under moonlit 
trees, or look at a woman with a young child in her arms, and 
wish that this warmth of human love would touch her. But 
it did not. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


235 


She had maDy who wooed her, but none who moved her. 
Sometimes it seemed to her that she was like a high-strung 
instrument, that echoes all the emotions of the soul but re- 
mains itself insensible to them. 

She led a life of much isolation by choice, and of much 
retirement by preference. She considered that to be great the 
artist must be much alone with himself and with nature, and the 
leisure she had was given to the arts. When she went into 
the world it amused her for half an hour ; then it grew tedious. 
She liked better her library, her atelier, her solitude ; or the 
open air, where every breath that blew took her in fancy to 
the woods and waters of her happy childhood. 

“ You are an innocent woman, you are a famous woman, but 
you are not a happy woman,” said a great wise man to her 
once. 

“ No ? I suppose there is always something missing,” she 
answered him. 

Meanwhile, the world in general knew that she was famous, 
thought that she was happy, but did not in the least believe 
her innocent. 

To loris, as to the world, it seemed strange to find a woman 
who was still young, and had some place in the great world, 
passing her time in study and in thought. To come in with 
the early morning to her, and see her, with old chronicles 
and crabbed manuscripts, following the threads of disputed 
liistories or gathering the thoughts of forgotten pasts, had a 
charm for him. In his youth he had been a student too, and 
to meet her in her own field he shook off him that worldly 
levity and that lower habit of thought which had obscured 
and absorbed his mind in his later years. It attracted yet it 
tantalized him to find her pure intellectual abstractions absorb 
her, whilst the daily pleasures of other women’s lives scarce 
held her for a second. He felt that to make this woman know 
a human passion would be to draw her down to earth and break 
her skyward-bearing wings, and yet he desired to do it, — daily 
desired more and more. 

As with him so with a chamois-hunter who, seeing a moun- 
tain hawk sailing far, far away in the clear rarefied air above 
the clouds, lifts his rifle and sends death through the blue 
serene sacred peace of the still heavens. 

The bird drops into a deep abyss where no eyes see its dying 


236 


FRIENDSHIP. 


agony. It is out of reach, and if reached were of no use to 
him who shot it, since he only seeks the chamois of the hills 
that gives him food and shoe-leather. And yet he fires. 

And the bird is dead. 

Something of the hunter’s feeling woke in him now. She 
was so far away and so content in that high air where nothing 
mortal followed. He wanted to bring her down and handle 
her closer, and feel if her heart beat, — make it beat, indeed, 
by pain, if only pain would do it. Not from cruelty; oh, no. 
He was never cruel to the lowliest thing that moved. Only 
from vague curiosity, and a baffled wonder, and an awakening 
desire, and that eagerness for what is rare and strange, which 
is as eager in the man with his loves as in the child with his 
pastimes. 

So he came to her constantly in the long mornings of the 
winter, when the sun grew warm at noon ; and went to houses 
where he could meet her, when he could secure an hour’s free- 
dom ; and studied her, and grew a little more familiar with her 
day by day, and learned the details of her life, and told her 
stories of his own, and gave her that delicate, half-uttered, 
all-eloquent sympathy which his tact, perhaps, rather than his 
heart taught him at first ; and at times would sit quite silent 
gazing at her with that mystical, voluptuous, contemplative 
light in his dreamy gaze which Love has given to the Southern 
and the Eastern alone of the sons of men, and which will 
draw a woman toward it as the sun draws up the dew. 

Meanwhile, the one who believed she held the key of his 
thoughts knew nothing of the truth. 

So long as he was always close at hand to be shown off as 
a slave, so long as he consented to follow her about and be 
made absurd at her pleasure, so long as he bought and sold 
and fetched and carried for her, and she could call on lo aloud 
to all the four winds of heaven wheresoever she went, with 
the display and vanity that were so sweet to her, so long the 
Lady Joan was not a woman to notice a stifled sigh, a laggard 
step, a look of weariness, a gesture of reluctance. These are 
the signs that women who love well, read, trembling, and in 
themselves droop by as the field-born pimpernel droops by the 
darker passing of a summer rain-cloud. But she was not one 
of these. Her vanity bore her buoyant against all perception 
of such changes. He was her servant, her worshipper, her 


FRIENDSHIP. 237 

lover, her plaything : what more could he want of heaven or 
of earth ? 

So long as she enchained his person it never occurred to 
her that his mind, and his heart, and his soul might be else- 
where. 

Now and then a thrill of savage jealousy ran through her, 
wakened by some word of Marjory Scrope’s or some sight of 
Etoile ; but it was soon lulled by a careless laugh or a con- 
temptuous denial from loris. 

She was duped where a less vain and less arrogant temper 
would have been instantly alarmed. 

IMeanwhile, oppression had its usual result, and produced as 
its fruit deception. 

loris was of a frank and tender nature, but he had lived 
much among women, and they had made him false. 

The untruthfulness of women communicates itself to the 
man whose chief society they form, and the perpetual neces- 
sities of intrigue end in corrupting the temper whose chief 
pursuit is passion. 

Women who environ a man’s fidelity by ceaseless suspicion 
and exaction create the evil that they dread. 

loris deceived this woman at first in trifles, later on in graver 
things, because she ruthlessly demanded from him an amount 
of time and a surrender of will which no man will ever give 
without becoming either openly or secretly a rebel. She had 
made him fear her, so he betrayed her. In love, as in a king- 
dom, the tyrant sits upon a hollow throne. 

But she was one of those to whom “ an immense Me is the 
measure of the Universe and this “ immense Me” obscured 
a sight otherwise sharp as the hawk’s and clear as the pigeon’s. 

Meantime, loris once more rose to the light of the day with 
the sense that the day might bring some charm he was not 
sure of, some interest he would not exhaust. Once more the 
delight of the uncertain had come to him, playing fitfully 
about his path ; and once more the sound of the lutes in the 
moonlight, the sheen of the stars above the palms and the 
laurels, seemed in unison with his fancies, because, once more, 
he felt young. He did not reason about it, because he was a 
man who never reasoned when he could avoid doing so, and 
who always shut his eyelids as long as he could to what was 
inconvenient or painful. But he resigned himself with few 


238 


FRIENDSHIP. 


struggles to the fresh influences that stole on him, and never 
asked himself when they would leave him. 

His mistress had been right when she had said that there 
was something of the Faust and something of the Romeo in 
him, but there was still more of the Hamlet. He would bear 
the ills he had, for fear of others that he knew not of, and 
would question himself at times, — 

** Am I a coward ? 

It cannot be 

But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall 
To make oppression bitter.” 

The delicate, unreal reasoning, the vacillation of thought 
which produced infirmity of purpose, the wounded pride which 
took refuge in silence, the complexity of impulses which bafiled 
at unravelling them both friend and foe, the armor of jest, the 
inner core of sadness, had all of them the Hamlet cast. Like 
Hamlet he could smile upon his foe ; like Hamlet he could 
make mock of his own dishonor ; like Hamlet he was destined 
to say of the deepest passion of his life, “ You should not 
have believed me : I loved you not,” and loved the more all 
the while he said it. 


CHAPTER XX. 

“ How ridiculous it is that she should go to such places !” 
said the Lady Joan, a day or two later, with wrath and scorn, 
as she ate her breakfast, flinging away a local journal which 
recorded the name of Etoile in the list of guests at a Russian 
grand duchess’s party. 

“ Why ridiculous ?” said loris, between his teeth, without 
looking up. His face grew darker as he stooped and picked 
up the paper. 

“ Why ?” screamed the Lady Joan. “ Wh^ f It is worse 
than ridiculous ! It is disgusting !” 

“ Why ?” said loris, very coldly. 

The Lady Joan burst out laughing. 

“ Good heavens, lo ! Where have you lived ? You who 
used to know Paris like a book ! you who pretend to know 
the world !” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


239 


“ I do not understand,” said her lover, still coldly. 

“ Oh, don’t you? I should think you might well enough, 
though you never can see half an inch before your nose ! 
Look what a life she’s led !” 

“Perfectly innocent? That is rare. But is it forbidden, 
objectionable ?” 

The Lady Joan shrieked with fresh laughter. 

“ Innocent ? You’re innocent ! Why, only listen to any- 
body talking about her for ten minutes, and you’ll hear enough 
to set your very hair on end. You never went to ’em, I sup- 
pose, but her Sunday evenings in Paris were scandalous ! — 
that I do know for a fact. Even respectable men wouldn’t go.” 

loris laughed a little slightingly. 

“ I have never met any one of my sex so very virtuous. 
I suppose those very virtuous men belong to your country. 
But, ma clilre^ since you know such things of her, why 
receive her ?” 

“ It was that old beast Voightel.” 

“ Surely it was your father?” 

“ Oh, Lord, no ! She hardly knew papa. At least, yes, 
of course, she did know him, but he only went to her now 
and then.” 

“ Where the respectable men would not go ? Poor Lord 
Archie !” ’ 

The Lady Joan colored and grew angry. 

“ You know very well what I mean : poor dear papa never 
is as particular as he ought to be.” (loris thought of Lord 
Archie lying smoking under the cherry-trees of Fiordelisa, and 
mentally agreed that he was not.) “ And she charms men, and 
all that kind of thing; improper women always do,” continued 
the Lady Joan, who was so used to putting on her ruff of de- 
corum that she would put it on sometimes even with those 
who ruffled it the most. “ The life of Etoile has been in- 
famous, altogether infamous. I know so many people who 
know all about her, and of course since we became acquainted 
with her I’ve naturally inquired more. If I had known all I 
do now, of course I never would have let her set her foot in 
my door.” 

“ It is a very beautiful foot,” said loris, who felt a great 
anger in him that he dared not display and could not alto- 
gether smother; and either by accident or design, his eyes 


240 


FRIENDSHIP. 


glanced at the foot of the Lady Joan, visible from the short- 
ness of her skirt, in the large stout boot which tramped over 
his ploughed fields and in and out so many studios and up and 
down so many stairs of the Bona Lea’s temples. The glance 
and the words filled up the measure of her fury, — a fury she 
smothered as he did his anger, for these two people, whilst 
living in the closest intimacy, almost habitually deceived each 
other. She flung herself round to a bureau, and took out a 
letter and threw it to him. 

“ There I read that, since you don’t believe me T' 

loris read : his eyebrows drew together a little, but other- 
wise his face did not change. He read it calmly through, 
then gave it back to her. 

“ Conclusive, — if true.” 

It was a letter from a man who did ill in art what Etoile 
did supremely well, — a man who had hungered after her suc- 
cesses with envious greed for many a year, — a man, moreover, 
who had endeavored to pay court to her and had failed. To 
him, knowing him well, the Lady Joan had written a careless 
question or two about Etoile : in answer he had poured out 
— exaggerated — all that calumny had ever invented of her. 
Lady Joan had relied on the almost certain fact that when a 
man’s or a woman’s nature is not noble it will be very petty 
indeed : there is but little middle way betwixt the two. 

“ Conclusive, if true,” said loris, carelessly, and handed her 
the sheet. “ But why should we quarrel about her ? She is 
nothing to us ; and she is here to-day and will be gone to- 
morrow.” 

His heart was beating with anger and impatience, and a 
certain sickness of doubt was stealing upon him, and with 
it also a better impulse of chivalrous championship of the 
wronged and absent woman. But habit was stronger with 
him than any of these feelings, and it was his habit constantly 
to conceal all his real thoughts from his inquisitor. The screw 
never brings forth but a galled lie. 

“If true!” echoed the Lady Joan, a little more satisfied, 
locking up her letter. “There’s no ‘if’ about it. Anybody 
who knows her will tell you the same thing. It was disgraceful 
of my father to send her to me; but Voightel can always 
turn him round his finger, and Voightel’s a breast.” 

loris remained silent : he had heard Voightel rhapsodized 


FRIENDSHIP, 


241 


over in the Casa Challoner with the most fervent worship as 
the most learned, most distinguished, most marvellous of men, 
and once, when he had been expected there, though he had 
not arrived, had seen the dryest of wines, the choicest of pipes, 
the sweetest of words got ready to salute his arrival. 

At the instant Mr. Challoner entered. 

“We were talking of Etoile, Robert,” said his wife. 
“ Aren’t you disgusted with that brute Voightel persuading 
my father to send her to rtie f' 

Mr. Challoner was used to catching quickly a clue. 

“ It was certainly ill advised,” he said, in his best and most 
wooden manner. “ One cannot be too careful, and there are 
very odd stories ” 

The Lady Joan felt that there were moments in which Mr. 
Challoner was priceless. 

“ So I was saying to lo,” she answered him. “ Her life in 
Paris was always very queer, wasn’t it ?” 

“ And you are always over-indulgent and hasty,” said Mr. 
Challoner, with the paternal manner which now and then he 
assumed with much effect. “ Yes ; yes. Of course it would 
have been better not to have known her, but when we go to 
the country the acquaintance will die a natural death, and if 
she be here another winter we need not resume it. Here is a 
telegram from Sicily, loris.” 

Telegrams from Sicily were always flying in at the Casa 
Challoner. 

In gratitude to Free Italy for the agreeable refuge she gave 
them, and the many teacups and triptychs she let them pick 
up, Mr. Challoner and his wife (or rather his wife and Mr. 
Challoner) had determined on creating for her a tubular bridge. 

The bridge was to go over the Straits of Messina, by the 
Gulf of Faro, and connect Sicily with the mainland, and do 
away with brigandage and barbarism for ever and aye. There 
was very little of it made as yet, except upon paper, — nothing, 
indeed, except some piles that had been driven in on the shore 
by Scylla ; but the prospectus had been out, and the shares all 
sold, for four years past, and a Scotch duke was the nominal 
head of it, and a great many clerks and contractors were fussing 
and fuming over it alike in Calabria and in Cannon Street, and 
money was turning about it in the churn of the Exchanges 
and Chambers of Commerce. 

L 


21 


242 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ My bridge,” the Lady Joan called it, with a fine wholesale 
appropriation, — as she said “ my farm” when talking of Fior- 
delisa. 

She thought herself a great woman of business. The age 
of Money, of Concessions, of Capitalists, and of Limited 
Liabilities, has largely produced the female financier, who 
thinks, with M. de Camors, that “ VhumaniU est composee des 
actionnaires'^ Other centuries have had their especial type 
of womanhood : the learned and graceful hetaira^ the saintly 
and ascetic recluse, the warrior of Oriflamme or Red Rose, 
the dame de heaiiti, all loveliness and light, like a dew-drop, 
the philosophic pricieuse^ with sesquipedalian phrase, the 
revolutionist, half nude of body and wholly nude of mind, 
each in her turn has given her sign and seal to her especial 
century, for better or for worse. The nineteenth century has 
some touch of all, but its own novelty of production is the 
female speculator. 

The woman who, breathless, watches la haiisse and la haisse; 
whose favor can only be won by some hint in advance of the 
newspapers ; whose heart is locked to all save golden keys ; 
who starts banks, who concocts companies, who keeps a broker, 
as in the eighteenth century a woman kept a monkey, and in 
the twelfth a knight ; whose especial art is to buy in at the 
right moments and to sell out in the nick of time ; who is 
great in railways and canals and new bathing-places and shares 
in fashionable streets ; who chooses her lovers, thinking of 
concessions, and kisses her friends for the sake of the secrets 
they may betray from their husbands : — what other centuries 
may say of her who can tell ? 

The Hotel Rambouillet thought itself higher than heaven, 
and the generation of Catherine of Sienna believed her deal 
planks the sole highway to the throne of God. 

But the present age is blessed with the female financier, 
and must make the best of her, as it must of the rotten rail- 
ways, the bubble banks, the choked-up mines, the sand-filled 
canals, the solitudes of brick and mortar, which it owes to her 
genius. 

Lady Joan believed herself to be one of these modern 
blessings. For those who would listen to her, she had always 
miracles to tell of films she saved and concessions she obtained, 
of ministers’ graces won by her smile and monarchs’ signatures 


FRIENDSHIP. 


243 


obtained by her intercession. According to herself, there was 
scarce a steamer that floated, or banker that prospered, or 
traction-engine that ran, or new street that was traced out,, 
from the Thames to the Nile, from the Danube to the Tigris, 
that did not owe something to her procreative or protecting 
powers. She described herself as a kind of ambulatory Lamp 
of Aladdin, and if you only rubbed her up (the right way) 
she would make a palace spring up for you like a mushroom, 
flow much of this was true, and how much imagination, was 
perhaps one of those things that no man will ever know, — 
like the real thoughts of Lord Beaconsfield, or the real use of 
the secret-service money in England, or the real discoveries 
of the Black Cabinet under Persigny. It was an Eleusinian 
mystery. 

Profane persons were apt to consider that her ability for 
commerce was chiefly exercised in buying pots and pans and 
chairs and tables, in old shops, in old highways and byways 
wherever she went, north, south, east, or west. But this was 
ill-nature. She really had a talent for getting up companies 
and persuading people to take shares in them, and was very 
fond of running up the back-stairs of politics and coming down 
them with the pot-luck of a ministerial concession or of a royal 
subsidy picked up from the seething stew-pan of international 
jobberies. 

Her lovers devoutly believed in her as a woman of business. 
It was not an attribute that attracted, but it was one that awed 
them. “ Damn it, madame, who falls in love with attributes?’? 
says Berkeley. Probably no one. But the chain once fastened, 
certain attributes may serve to rivet it, especially when they 
are fear-compelling. 

In his soul loris detested these South Sea Bubbles that his 
mistress was so fond of blowing. It is not engaging to see 
the Bourse quotations seized as eagerly as your love-notes 
could be, or to have a tender silence broken by a sudden recol- 
lection that Macmaw and Filljaw’s telegram at once must be 
answered. 

But, though it revolted him, it served to entangle him. 
Ilis name was of use to her ; she taught him how to obtain 
concessions, and knew herself how to work them when got ; 
his influence was of use to her; his title sparkled on the Mes- 
sina Bridge prospectus before the Board in Cannon Street, and 


244 


FRIENDSHIP. 


enabled her to say in England that she had all Italy at her 
beck and call, as in Italy she*said she had all England. She 
was a woman of resources and of foresight ; gradually she 
drew all his affairs into her hands, and made him drift at her 
will hither and thither ; she got him into the habit of being 
guided by her, and habit has much weight on a Southern 
temper ; she thrust through her amorous butterfly the honey- 
laden pin of commerce, and fastened down the wings that, 
without it, would have borne him to fresher flowers. 

Besides, Finance served her well in other ways than this : 
if Paris and Menelaiis had gone together to build a bridge or 
dig a canal, they could never afterwards, for very ridicule’s 
sake, have called up Greece to arms. 

“ They’ve gone to Calabria together to see about my bridge,” 
she would say to Mrs. Grundy at five-o’clock tea. “ Such a 
bore 1 isn’t it ? I’m quite dull without them. But it will be 
a grand thing for Italy when it is done ; so one must not mind 
trouble.” 

“ They” was her pet pronoun, her horse of battle, her choice 
piece of prudence, and Mrs. Grundy would go away and say 
to Mrs. Candor, “ He’s only with her so much because they’re 
making a tubular bridge by the Gulf of Faro. The Duke of 
Oban is president of it ; a great deal of English money is put 
into it. Fine idea, very. Her idea originally, I believe. Oh, 
what a cruel backbiting world we live in, my dear !” 

Meanwhile, until “ they” came back from Calabria, Lady 
Joan petted good-looking Douglas Graeme, or handsome Eccel- 
lino da Sestri, or Guido Serravalle with his guitar, or anybody 
else that came handy, and had cosy little dinners with plump 
Mimo in the corner, and tuneful Guido to sing to her, and en- 
joyed herself exceedingly, and wrote to loris word every day 
that she was wretched. 

This winter morning, however, the telegram brought no 
call to Calabria, and she had planned to spend it at Fiordelisa, 
Mr. Challoner — the telegram disposed of — proceeded to tell 
her that it was ten o’clock, and the ponies were standing at 
the door. 

The morning was still very cold ; snow was still upon all 
the hills, a fierce wind was blowing boisterously down the face 
of the river ; it was not attractive weather for the country. 
Ions sighed uneasily as he took up all her shawls, and went 


FRIENDSHIP. 245 

down-stairs, to be driven by her across the Campagna in the 
teeth of the Alpine blasts. 

Mr. Challoner stood in the window up-stairs, and watched 
their departure with the nearest approach to a smile that ever 
appeared upon his countenance. Then he went into his own 
little sanctum, stirred up his fire, sat down in his most comfort- 
able chair, and began to read his French and English papers. 
He felt that this morning at least he had the better part. 

“ He’s a very useful fellow to me,” Mr. Challoner had said 
in an unguarded moment once, over some sherry, to old Lord 
George Stair, who had mumbled a vague assent, and had 
thought, among other wicked things he had read in his far- 
away youth, of Diderot’s song of Six Sous that Grimm quotes 
in his Memoirs. 

Meantime, while Mr. Challoner enjoyed his “ Pall Mall 
Gazette” and his “ Figaro” before an oak fire, with a pipe of 
fragrant tobacco to make him yet more comfortable, the ponies 
sped on, under the lash of his wife’s whip, through the chilly 
and windy morning. 

“ Are you grown dumb, lo ?” she said, sharply, as they flew 
over the frosted turf. 

loris drew his furs closer across his mouth. 

“ It is not agreeable to swallow ice,” he said, coldly ; but the 
ice that hurt him was the ice at his heart, not the ice in the 
air. 

“ It is only jealousy made her say those things !” he was 
thinking to himself, and his fealty went out to Etoile, with the 
eager revolt and the caressing devotion that slander of an ab- 
sent thing he cares for will rouse in any man who has a man’s 
heart beating within him. 

And he cared for her gi-eatly already, though he was half 
unwilling and half afraid to face the truth of it and all its 
perils, and hid it from himself under the shelter of a thousand 
plausible synonymes and reasons. 

The Lady Joan, who heeded cold weather no more than she 
heeded the cold shoulder of a desirable acquaintance, cut his 
ponies over the ears, and rattled onward, with her pistol-case 
under her feet in case she should be in a mood to shoot cats 
or robins, on both of which she waged fiery war. 

The cats might kill a chicken, and the robins steal a cherry. 

loris often pleaded for both, but in vain. 

21 * 


246 


FRIENDSHIP. 


The grand old house looked bleak and dreary in the cloudy 
angry day, with the mountain-winds rushing through the leaf- 
less aisles of its vineyards. Imperator howled in his kennel, 
and the heart of his master ached. The Lady Joan sprang 
down at the court-yard gate, and kilted her skirts high, and 
wrapped her waterproof about her, and, calling out for Gian, 
for Vico, for Beppo, for Cecco, whilst those frightened servitors 
came tumbling out from stable, wine-cellar, tool-house, and 
barn, strode away, to the delight of her soul, scolding, weigh- 
ing, scmtinizing, ordering, railing, altering, chaffering, bully- 
ing, raising heaven and earth because a measure was short, 
and unpacking a wagon-load of cabbages to make sure that 
their number was right. She had a hundred thousand things 
to do before she could enjoy herself and shoot her cats and 
robins. 

loris, free for the moment, lighted a cigar and strolled away 
by himself over his lonely fields, green with the tender young 
corn and red with barberry and bryony. He heard her voice 
in loud discussion with his bailiff as to which Roman bull was 
to be mated with the new brindled cow from Alderney, and 
shuddered a little in disgust as he heard. “ Her breviary is 
the stock-book !” he thought, and went on his lonely walk 
under the edge of the woods. 

He thought of Etoile by her hearth. 

Would she miss him this morning? 

With loris gentle impulses were natural. His character had 
in it that honey of softness which the flies will eat, — and tigers 
and bears as well as flies. Old people lived on him with no 
other claim than their utter uselessness ; hangers-on devoured 
his substance because he had not resolution enough to cut them 
adrift; a poor old homeless soul slipped and broke her limb as 
he was passing, and he took her into his own house and kept 
her there year upon year ; an unwillingness to see pain, and 
an aversion to wound, were strong in him ; Lady Joan found 
it out, and despised it, and laughed at it, and profited by it, 
all at once. “ lo’s such a fool,” she would say, — and think 
him such a fool, — and yet all the while love the folly in him 
from its own utter unlikeness to herself. 

It had grown to be with him as of old it was with the Capet 
kings and their Maires du Palais. The natural indolence and 
infirmity of purpose which often cripples many fine and deli- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


247 


cate minds found relief in her strong opinions and her decisive 
action : it became so much easier to answer, “ Ask the signora,” 
than to decide for himself between disputing servants or to 
refuse for himself a supplicant’s petition. Things had to be 
done that he was not hard enough or rough enough to do him- 
self: it became so much simpler to say, “ Go to the signora,” 
than incur an hour’s contention, or send away an old farmer 
with tears in his eyes. She liked all this kind of authority 
and tyranny ; and he detested it. So the habit of reliance on 
her grew, and, being first sown by the generosity of his nature, 
became fast rooted in his nature’s weakness. 

There was not a question but that things went on in much 
more orderly mode since she had hung up her cachemire at 
Fiordelisa. 

The old happy, careless, wasteful ways were ended, just as 
the old wooden ploughs that might have served Cincinnatus 
were replaced by new steel ones from Shefiield. True, the people 
were sullen and discontented ; true, there was not a shepherd 
tliat did not scowl where he had been used to smile, as he 
leaned on his staff on the thyme-covered hills and watched his 
padrone go by. 

“ But look at the figures at Torlonia’s,” she would say, if 
he remonstrated. 

And how could he remind her that the figures at Torlonia’s 
were not at the head of his own balance-sheet ? 

There are things that a man cannot say. 

She had twisted the steward’s whip and pen out of his hands 
with a jerk, had sent the drones and parasites flying, had 
brought the devil incarnate, the people thought, in screaming 
farm-engines, had cut down all the estimates and all the wages, 
had nipped off the beggar’s crusts to crumble whole loaves 
away on her own hobbies, and had let her fancy run riot in 
building and cattle-breeding, if she could be said to have any- 
thing about her so aerial and foolish as a fancy. 

All this was noisy, unpleasant, interminable work, though 
she thought it a paradise, and pooh-poohed any demurrer or 
remonstrance on the part of the master of Fiordelisa with the 
sublime disdain she always showed for other people’s feelings. 

In the years that had elapsed since the fi\mily had gone 
there with the flower-seeds and the kitchen boiler, and been 
first visited there by Lady George Scrope-Stair with her 


248 


FRIENDSHIP. 


sanctifying knitting-needles, the quiet noble old place had 
known few moments of peace. Hammers had almost always 
been going, workmen working, smiths soldering, delvers dig- 
ging, in a confusion of sounds that made loris’s head ache 
and made yawning gaps in his capital for endless wages. 
There is nothing in the world so amusing as to make improve- 
ments when other people will pay for them : vestries, landscape- 
gardeners, architects, and city aediles all know this ; and Lady 
Joan was not a whit behind vestries and aediles in her appre- 
ciation of it. 

loris looked wistful when a brave row of evergreen oaks 
fell, to give place to a row of brand-new granaries raised on 
new principles ; or a rose-garden perished, to make an acre of 
asparagus- and pineapple-beds : he looked grave when he saw 
the sum total that the new granaries and the asparagus- and 
pineapple-beds cost: did not the old barns and threshing-floors, 
the old vegetables and orchards, do just as well ? 

“ You’ll find the profit of it all by and by,” said the Lady 
Joan to him : as the vestries and aediles say so to the public. 
But he failed ever to see the profit : he could only see Black 
Care as the bills came in, and the laborers crowded round his 
steward to be paid, week after week, month after month. 

No doubt. Lady Joan was a great administrator; but great 
administrators are expensive luxuries to the states which sup- 
port them. 

loris had never been rich, and, with the new granaries and 
asparagus-beds, and all the other improvements, he felt himself 
growing poorer every hour. 

He was very tired of it. He was stung by the muttered 
words and dark glances of his peasantry. He liked to be well 
with all people, and the discontent of his contadini oppressed 
him. In other years, when he had made brief visits in the 
vintage-time, the people had worshipped him and met him 
with music and laughter and song and their tributes of fruits 
and of flowers; now they passed him sullenly, or, if they 
stopped him, stopped but to complain. He was pained by 
them and for them, but he did nothing. Personal kindness 
he would show them whenever he could. But he did not lift 
his hand to stay hers that fell so heavily on them. 

He loved them as he loved the hound Imperator. But ho 
feared her more. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


249 


Often he would go out in the fields and roam by himself, 
for very weariness, and then on the beautiful wild hill-side, 
scarlet with poppies and fragrant with the wild cistus bushes, 
he would m'eet some old man or some young child, who would 
stop him and hold their hand out and mutter of the tyrannies 
of the “ padrona” up at the house, and he would give them 
money that he could ill afford, and go back impatient and sor- 
rowful, and, as he passed through the house, hear the notes of 
the mandolin twanging, and the tinkle of the cofiee-cups upon 
the terrace, and the laughter of Lady Joan and of Burletta, 
and would avoid it all with a vague distaste, and go up to 
his own room and lock himself in there and glance at his 
mother’s portrait and know that he had sinned and met his 
retribution. 

In these old noble places life should be “set to music.” 
Love, in it§ highest passion and its fairest forms ; Art as the 
gift of God to man ; day-dreams, in which the hours unfold, 
beautiful and uncounted, like the leaves of the oleander flowers ; 
nights, when “ the plighted hands are softly locked in sweet 
unsevered sleep gay laughter here and there, glad charity 
with all things ; meditation now and then to deepen the well- 
springs of the mind ; the open air always ; limbs bathed in the 
warmth as in a summer sea ; the opal skies of evening watched 
with fancies of the poets ; and everywhere perpetual sense of 
a delicious rest, and of desire and of hope crowned to fruition : 
this was the life for Fiordelisa. 

And he knew it. 

And he instead abode in this : fierce wrangle, lowest aims ; 
shrewd watchfulness for gain, perpetual chatter of art as means 
of loss and profit ; hard tyranny and sated possession that 
dressed themselves as passion and made dupes one of the other; 
and all through the long and radiant hours of the day one 
voice forever ringing in glee or wrath because a bird was shot, 
or theft of grain unpunished, or grapes by the high-road 
poached, or old coins found dug up under the garden-mould 
that could be sold again, or old pottery found in some poor 
peasant’s hut, bought for a loaf of bread and good in the 
winter for the guineas of a millionaire. 

And he endured the one life and he dreamed of the other, and 
knew what the years might be, yet bore with them as they were 
from habit and from fear and from inertia, and meanwhile the 


250 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Lady Joan reigned as she chose in Fiordelisa, and cut the trees, 
and weighed the produce, and vulgarized the rooms, and harried 
the peasantry, and meddled with the wine-presses, and rooted 
herself into the soil, so that never should any stdp save hers 
be heard there, and never any offspring of his old race bloom 
there, and heeded not the desolation that she worked for him, 
— heeded it no more than she did the curse of the peasant 
hungering in his hut, or the pangs of the song-bird dying in 
the summer. 

What did his sighs or his people’s matter to her ? 

So long as she kept Fiordelisa, and drove Pippo and Grille 
about, and trafficked in pictures and laces and furniture, and 
exhibited her lover in all places and possibilities to everybody 
as her prey and property and appendage, what did it matter to 
her whether the heart of the man was weary, or his nerves 
jaded, or his passion worn out? what did it matter; to her that 
all liberty and peace and gladness had withered for him under 
her touch ? what did it matter to her that he shut his eyes 
with a shudder from facing the blank that was all his here- 
after ? 

Women who love to folly may watch with terror a weary 
glance, may torture their own hearts in endless doubt whether 
they be not unworthy of the heart that beats upon theirs, may 
be ready to cast themselves adrift on a sea of misery rather 
than drag as a weight for a day on the life that is dearer than 
their own soul to them. But the Lady Joan was no such 
fool. 

She had got him and she held him fast, as a fisherman a 
prize from the sea. He might writhe, might sigh, might strug- 
gle, might sicken, might be weary at times unto death : what 
did she care for that ? She saw a glimpse of it sometimes, 
and it smote her vanity to the quick, though she never com- 
prehended its full import ; but it never entered her thoughts 
to release him or offer him release. She only pulled the curb 
tighter, and revenged herself by sharper observation and by 
harder tyranny. 

So long as she had what she wanted, and incurred no mor- 
tification in the sight of others, she was not likely to set him 
free for any consideration so slight and unimportant to her as 
his own wishes. Weak women thought about those things, 
but Lady Joan was strong. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


251 


This day seemed to him more long and tedious than any he 
_ad ever passed. 

When they sat down to luncheon in the chilly tapestried 
room which wanted summer and the roses of summer to 
brighten it, she entertained him with a bead-roll of her victories 
and her captives, of a stable-boy’s theft punished, a kite killed 
and nailed to the door, a hundred thrushes trapped for market, 
a fox’s earth found and stopped, that the fox might die of 
suffocation in its hole, a false bottom to a sieve detected as the 
grain was measured, an error found in the manure receipts, a 
stray dog shot, a cat hanged by the neck, a litter of pigs born. 
He listened wearily ; he was tired of it all, because he was tired 
of her. 

As yet he scarcely realized that this — the quart d'heure de 
JRahelais, to which all passion that is merely passion comes 
soon or late — had struck for him. He was silent and inatten- 
tive throughout the midday meal ; and when at length the 
Lady Joan, furious at his indifference, uprose from his table 
and threw some silver off it, and told him that he deserved to 
be ruined and die in the hospital, and that she was a fool to 
fag out her life for him as she did, he could only sit silent still, 
being unable to reply according to his honest thoughts, and 
only hoped that she would not go into hysterics. Lady Joan 
could have hysterics when all other weapons failed, as well as 
the merest llosa-Matilda that ever breathed. 

This time, however, she did not go into them, because she 
had a great many last instructions to give to the huttero about 
that Alderney cow, and also remembered that she was to dine 
at seven o’clock with her cousins Lord and Lady Fingal at the 
lies Britanniques. For checking hysterics there is no receipt 
so good as to remember a dinner-party. 

It was twilight in the freezing winter’s day when she deigned 
at length to depart, with some pineapples out of the hotbeds 
for her friends, and give her last order, and leave the grand 
old house to the night and the cold, and drive back across the 
plain with two mounted shepherds behind them, well armed, 
in case of any thieves that might spring from behind a ruined 
tomb or a cluster of acacias. 

They reached home in safety, where Mr. Challoner, having 
passed a tranquil afternoon in the club and at the Messina 
bridge offices, where he was held an oracle, was waiting, ready 


252 


FRIENDSHIP. 


dressed for the Fingal dinner, with lighted lamps and an even- 
ing newspaper, serene and solemn in his solitude as a Red 
Indian chief at a “ big smoke.” 

loris, who was not invited to the Fingal party, excused him- 
self from remaining to see them off on the plea of a chill he 
had felt and much correspondence to answer, and hurried to 
the house of Etoile ere it should be the hour for his own 
attendance at the Quirinale. 

“ I cannot sleep without seeing her,” he said to himself. 

“ What on earth’s come to lo, I wonder ?” said the Lady 
Joan, very crossly. “ He’s always ill now, — or stupid.” 

Mr. Challoner lifted his eyes from his “ Pall Mall Gazette.” 

“ In love,” he said, curtly, with immovable visage, and re- 
placed his eyeglass, which had dropped. He and his wife 
always kept up a polite fiction between themselves, even in 
private : loris was their mutual friend. 

Lady Joan darted from her brilliant eyes such a look of 
flame as a tigress might give whose hard-earned prey was 
snatched from her jaws. 

“ Pshaw !” she said, savagely : “ what an idiot you are, 
Robert, always !” 

Mr. Challoner perused the “ Pall Mall Gazette” unmoved : 
revenge was sweet, but peace was sweeter. 

Fortunately, to preserve his peace in the absence of the su- 
preme guardian of it, there entered handsome Douglas Graeme, 
her cousin, who came to escort his cousin to their other cousins, 
the Fingals ; and Lady Joan rushed to get herself into Genoa 
velvet, Irish point, and English propriety. 

Meanwhile, loris went and found Etoile in her chamber 
alone by the warmth of the hearth, and the spacious, quiet 
room, with its smell of hot-house heliotropes, and the odorous 
many-flowered narcissus, — which in Italy we call tazzette., and 
in France Jeannettes., and in England have no popular name 
for, because we have not the plant, — looked very familiar and 
inviting to him as he entered it, himself jaded, cold, and weary. 

“ I can stay but a few moments, I fear, but I thought I 
might venture to ask if you are well,” he said, softly bending 
to her with that look in his eyes by which a man tells the 
woman he looks on that she is a dearer sight to him than any 
other the world holds. 

“ You are not well yourself ; you seem tired.” Her voice 


FRIENDSHIP. 253 

trembled a little as she spoke to him, and her eyes fell before 
his. 

“ I am tired,’’ he said, with a sigh. 

The long, tasteless, dreary day unrolled before his memory 
as he spoke, begun in the chilly morning with altercation and 
strife, worn away in common cares and calculations of price 
and profit, ended with rough dispute or with coarse mirth as 
the sun began to grow low behind his leafless vineyards. They 
were all alike, these weary days, when it pleased his despot to 
call him forth in the cold mist that rose from the river, and 
make him go out to the old gray castle on the hill to levy 
tribute from his farms, and number his winter fruits, and harry 
the hearts of his people, in the pastime that she called looking 
after Fiordelisa. 

Once, when this passion had been young in him, he had 
risen joyfully enough to skim the gray Campagna with her ere 
the day was fully up, and pass the hours in enamored willing- 
ness in the solitudes of his deserted halls. But now ! — he rose 
to these days with a yawn, he felt their dull length drag on 
and on with a sigh ; they left him at their close worn out and 
disdainful of himself. 

“ I am tired,” he said, now, standing by the fire, and letting 
his eyes rest themselves in dreamy contemplation on Etoile. 

She gave him a yellow rose from a cluster that she had been 
placing in water as he had entered ; there was tea standing 
near her on a little Japanese stand ; she poured him out a cup, 
and brought it to him by the hearth. He followed all her 
movements with a sense of content and peace. 

As she tendered him the little cup, his fingers caressed 
hers, and, as he drew the cup away, his lips lingered on her 
wrist. 

She colored, and left him. 

“ Where have you come from now?” she asked him, as she 
went to the roses. 

The words stung him as a snake stings. 

“ I have come from Fiordelisa.” 

» Alone?” 

“ No 1 Have I ever the luxury to he alone?” 

Her heart beat quicker with an anger that she did not seek 
to analyze. 

“ Why complain of what is your choice ?” 

22 


254 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Was it ever my choice ?” he muttered, thinking of those 
earliest hours when a black-browed stranger had set her will to 
bring him to her feet. 

“ Surely it must have been when you gave Fiordelisa.” 

“ I never gave Fiordelisa. I thought at most of one sum- 
mer — of two ” 

“ Then how is it ?” 

‘‘How? Can I bid her go? I?” 

Etoile rose and walked to and fro a moment impatiently, 
pushing her hair out of her eyes. 

“ It is useless for me to pretend to misunderstand. Your 
position is not one a woman can talk of — without shame. But 
it were absurd to deny that I see it in its true light, and that 
I am very sorry for you, — very, very sorry ! And yet how can 
you live on in it ? The Triangle of Dumas ! — how unreal, 
how deceitful, how contemptible, how absolutely immoral in 
the deepest sense of immorality’s degradation, is this sin that 
you and she, and the world with you, call Friendship. Sin ! — 
the naked sins of the old days were innocence and decency 
beside it. One can excuse sin that is honest, one can compre- 
hend the fatal force of a blind passion, one can see how even 
an unholy love may be redeemed by sacrifice and courage. 
But this ! — it is only one long lie palmed off upon the world, 
and as cowardly as every lie must ever be !” 

“ The world is not deluded by the lie, believe me,” said loris, 
with his delicate contempt. 

“ If you had loved this woman,” she pursued, disregarding, 
“ if you had loved her really with any kind of great love, 
however guilty before the laws of man, could you have ever 
borne to live like this, to take the husband’s hand, to caress 
the child, to act the social farce ? If you had really loved her 
with any truth of love, such share of her with her duties and 
her friends would have been impossible to you, such adoption 
of her hearth and home would have been loathsome !” 

“ There is love and love,” said loris. “ You think of a kind 
of love that is seldom felt, that women like her cannot kindle. 
You do not understand ” 

“ No ! I do not understand. I understand passion, though 
I have not felt it. If you had struck the husband down upon 
the hearth, and borne the wife away from all the world, — that 
I could have understood.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


255 


loris laughed a dreary scornful laugh. 

“ I know not which soonest would have repented such a 
tragedy, — she or he or I. There are women for whom the 
world may well be lost. Seriously, can you think her one of 
them ?” 

“ You must have thought her one of them once, at the least, 
or else ” 

“ Good heavens 1 how little you realize, how little you com- 
prehend ” 

His thoughts drifted back to the early time when a new- 
comer with basilisk eyes had cast her toils about him. The 
love born and matured behind black masks in the fumes of 
cigarette- smoke, in the riot of cotillons, in the daybreak hours 
after a ball, was not the love of which his companion spoke. 
The world well lost for love ! — he laughed out of the very 
weariness and heart-sickness of his soul, thinking of his mis- 
tress in loup and domino, in ruff and starch, screaming in the 
dingy crowd of the opera ball, lunching off lamb and lettuce 
with a dean ! 

“ Perhaps I do not comprehend. I am glad, then, I do not !” 
said Etoile, with more impatience than she knew. “ If you 
slew the husband, — or he you, — I am barbarian enough to 
feel that that might come within my sympathies. It would at 
least be frank !” 

loris laughed lightly and bitterly. 

“ Poor man ! he is terribly tiresome and ti'h-hourgeois. 
But why should I kill him for that? As to his killing me, 
I am his best friend, his sovffre-doulmr, his whipping-boy. 
Whatever other qualities he may lack, he is not ungrateful 
— to me !” 

Etoile unconsciously pulled asunder a rose she held, and 
shred its petals on the floor. 

“ I said I was sorry for you. I retract it. Since you can 
jest so about your fate, you are worthy of it.” 

» Jest !— I ?” 

He stooped and took her hands, and kissed them with a 
half-timid and half-passionate tenderness. 

“ If I jest, it is to hide that I suffer. Be sorry for me: 
Heaven knows I need it.” 

And he kissed her hands again, and went to the Court, 
where he was in waiting that night. 


256 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Etoile stood by her hearth with the fallen rose-leaves at 
her feet. 

She felt as if some share of their falsehood and of their 
shame had fallen on her. 

And yet a sweet and subtle joy, which she felt afraid of, 
stole upon her too. 

Meantime, the Lady Joan went and dined with her cousins 
the Fingals, and returned thence, much out of temper, to her 
own house. The dinner at the Fingals had tried her patience 
sorely ; it had been severe, dreary, dull ; she had sat between 
an archaeologist and a travelling Oxford professor ; neither 
had felt her fascinations, one had corrected her on a point of 
art; it was an utterly “ blank day,” both for business and for 
amusement. She felt as ill used as any M. F. H. who has 
been out from noon to night in rain and fog and has never 
once “ found.” Lady Joan hated waste of time, or waste of 
anything, even of lamp- cottons ; and she scolded her servants 
for having so many lamps burning when she went home. 

By the light of one of them she read some telegrams and 
letters : they did not improve her temper. They told her 
that the shares of the bridge over the Messina Straits, to 
which the Italian ministers had refused the subsidy, were a 
drug on the market, and that a fine Parmeggianino she had 
sent to London for sale had been examined by rude experts, 
and declared good for nothing, but the big piece of cypress- 
wood on which it was painted. 

“ Fools! dolts! idiots !” said Lady Joan, sweeping all the 
European exchanges and all European connoisseurs into the 
mighty circle of her scorn. She had promoted the bridge, 
she had purchased the Parmeggianino : was that not enough 
for the world ? 

“ They’ll say my pigs are not Berkshires next !” she said, 
in her wrath. 

“ No, no, no,” murmured Burletta, who had come in for a 
midnight cigar. “ No, no, no ! — the pigs are transcendent 
pigs ; of the plumpness and the roundness and the pinkness 
of babies are those pigs, and their bacon will be as a foretaste 
of paradise ; but as for pictures, and especially the Parmeggi- 
anino, you will do me the justice to admit, cara mia ” 

“ That you’re a transcendent ass 1” said the Lady Joan, 
furiously. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


257 


The very dear old Mimo lifted his shoulders to his ears and 
his eyebrows to the ceiling, and solemnly lighted an enormous 
cheroot. 

“ I always said the Parmeggianino would not go down in 
the city of London ; I always said that it would not go down,” 
he reiterated, for he adored his goddess, but he adored still 
more proving himself in the right, and he had always averred 
that the Parmeggianino was too crude, was too brown, was too 
big, was too glazed, was too strong meat, in point of fact, even 
for Shoddy’s acres of plaster walls. 

“You thankless bruteJ” cried his Minerva, flinging all her 
letters away in a crumpled ball. “ Is that all your gratitude 
for my getting your Tabernacle sold to the Fingals ?” 

The very dear old Mimo reposed his fat person comfortably 
among the sofa cushions. 

“ My Tabernacle is a beautiful Tabernacle,” he said, tran- 
quilly. “ Pure Quattro Cento ; pure Quattro Cento ; that I 
will swear, — not a detail of it that is not Quattro Centisto ; I 
chose every detail myself ; and the wood is old — old — old — 
that too I will swear, and I ought to know, for the wood was 
a flour-hutch of my mother’s when I was a baby, per Bacco I 
What more would Milordo Fingal have ?” 

“ You are an ass, Mimo 1” said Lady Joan, again, but she 
laughed a little whilst she frowned. 

“ Ohe-che — no 1 That I am not,” said Burletta, stoutly. 
“ In my way I am very wise. I know what the city of Lon- 
don and its very clever people will accept and what it will not 
accept, though I have never been there. It will be on its 
knees before my Tabernacle, if Milordo Fingal will show it in 
their Fine Arts Court ; all their South Kensington will adore 
my mother’s flour-hutch. But I did always say, you will allow, 
that the Parmeggianino ” 

Lady Joan gave him a sounding box on the ear. Undis- 
turbed, Burletta picked up his cigar, which had been shaken 
out of his mouth by the shock, and kissed the Lady Joan’s 
cruel fingers. 

“ Keep to the pigs, mia carissima, and let me choose the 
pictures,” he said, with paternal tenderness. And together they 
smoked the calumet of peace. 

In the recesses of his own soul Burletta began to have his 
doubts about Palmerstonc^, — began to think that Palmerston^ 
22 * 


258 


FRIENDSHIP. 


might after all not be very much more genuine than the over- 
big Parmeggianino. He began to think that Minerva, like 
Jove, sometimes nodded, and that the Messina Bridge, and 
other wonderful benefits to mankind, were not very much more 
trustworthy than his own rickety Benaissance chairs, and not 
one-half as solid as that venerable flour-hutch which his zeal 
for the antique had transformed into a tabernacle. But his 
misgivings he shut into his own loyal soul, and trotted about 
none the less valiantly, holding up his plump hands, and 
crying,— 

“ What a woman ! — ah, what a woman I Such influence, 
such power, such wisdom ! And yet look how she stoops to 

trifles, — those hams, those wines, those capons ” And 

then would be unable to proceed further, from sheer ecstasy. 

For to the very dear old Mimo, who had slender fare at 
home, and indeed had been used to satisfy nature off a roll 
and a sausage at a small osterid,, the breakfasts and dinners of 
the Casa Challoner and Fiordelisa were as banquets of the 
gods ; and it would have been hard indeed if, in return for 
them, he would not have held up his hands and cried aloud, — 

“ Such a woman ! — ah, such a woman ! The world has not 
her equal. There is nothing that she does not know, and 
nothing that she cannot do, — nothing, nothing, nothing !” 

And a good many people believed him, as they believed in 
his cracked bits of Limoges and his flour-hutch that was pro- 
moted to a tabernacle. There is nothing that you may not 
get people to believe in if you will only tell it them loud 
enough and often enough, till the welkin rings with it. A 
claque is an institution not confined to theatres, and naturally 
for a well-born lady who would take Lord and Lady Fingal to 
see his yellow ivories and his old Cremona fiddles, and could 
get him sublime orders from the mighty Hebrides for all sorts 
of things, from church doors as big as Alps to enamels no 
bigger than your thumb, the good and grateful Mimo felt that 
he could never clap his hands loud enough before the stage of 
the world. 

If she made mistakes — ovf ! — she was a woman, or, at 
least, Mimo would say, with a sudden misgiving that this ad- 
mission was derogatory to her, she was a goddess. But he, 
who metaphorically was the owl at the feet of this Minerva, 
could be familiar with her, as the owl may have jovially flapped 


FRIENDSHIP. 


259 


its wings in merry moments over the disbarred casque and the 
unbuckled aegis, and in such confidential familiarity would 
venture to say to her, — 

“ Keep to the pigs, mia carisstma, and let me choose the 
pictures.” 


CHAPTER XXL 

Lady Joan, who, when she was not blinded by the mufflers 
of her vanity and inordinate belief in herself, was very sharp- 
sighted, saw that society, when it has strained itself to swallow 
a good deal that is as much against its laws as wine against 
the Koran’s, will, by the natural law of expansion and recoil, 
require to be equally severe in refusing to swallow something 
else, if only in justification of its principles. Because society 
always adheres to its principles ; just as a Moslem subscribes 
none the less to the Koran because he may just have been 
blowing the froth ofif his bumper of Mumm’s before he goes 
to his mosque. 

The Duchess of Bridgewater was the highest and mightiest 
of gentlewomen, and her mere nod was honor, and if Lord 
Dauntless paid her bills, nobody could know it but his 
bankers, and all the great world stayed with her at her Castle 
of Indolence, in the heart of a country that crawled on its 
knees to her beck and her call. The Princess Gregarine was 
the mirror of fashion and the privileged vixen of courts : if 
common soldiers in their guard-rooms toasted her as a common 
wanton as they drank their rum, a polite society knows no- 
thing of what common soldiers say in their horrid guard-rooms. 
Lady Eyebright cheated at cards, and had her ears boxed, 
but she was always Lady Eyebright, because she never ran off* 
with any one of her lovers, and had a host of great relatives 
making everything smooth as fast as she ruffled it. Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams kept open house all the year long, a pleasant 
hotel, where no bill was brought, with fresh pleasure for every 
shining hour, and no demands made on either brains or de- 
cency, — a little temple of Fortune, with Pactolus flowing 
through it, so that any who pleased could dip his glass and 


260 


FRIENDSHIP. 


drink and come again. And Lady Joan, — Lady Joan was a 
precious precedent set on high like a lamp to lighten the dark- 
ness of all those ill-matched wives who fain would be consoled, 
yet fain would be both pitied and respected, as martyrs to a 
crooked circumstance. Society would not quarrel with any of 
these, nor any of the thousands of whom they were the types. 

Quarrel, indeed ! Nothing was further from its dreams. 
There was that “ salve 1” on the thresholds of these ladies’ 
houses, and their like, that Society, entering therein and find- 
ing Vice seated by the hearth, would, on coming out, declare 
Vice quite a changed creature, nay, not Vice at all, but fair 
Friendship, gentle Generosity, mere mirth, sweet gaiete dii 
cceur^ or what you will, something so innocent that saints 
might call her sister. 

But nature has an inevitable law of expansion and recoil : a 
society so elastic is of necessity equally tightly drawn at times. 

It will adore the Duchess of Bridgewater and Princess 
Gregarine ; it will apologize for Mrs. Henry V. Clams and 
Fiordelisa, and «ay with virtuous mien that it hates uncharita- 
ble judgment. 

But still, after doing so much, it must for principle’s sake 
condemn somebody, as the Turk, after his dry champagne, 
will order the stick to a Christian. 

It always must have some criminal to garrote with the iron 
collar of its conscientious censure. 

It had taken Dorotea Coronis. 

Lady Joan saw no reason why it should not take Etoile too. 

“Nothing against her?” she muttered, thinking over what 
she had heard. “ How sick one gets of their saying so 1 
Nothing against her? There must be heaps^ if one could 
only find it out ! And if there isn’t ” 

The Lady Joan knew herself a woman of rare invention and 
resources : she could prove her cheap bargains to be priceless 
treasures, and fill princes’ cabinets with her cupboard sweep- 
ings ; she could make Staffordshire Saxe and Rafaels to order, 
call Titians from the nether world, and summon all antiquity ; 
it would be odd indeed, she thought, if she could not do such 
a little thing as smirch a character and blast a life. 

“ You make buttons out of Dante’s skull !” cries Giusti in 
reproach to the world ; Lady Joan saw no reason why she 
should not sharpen poison-arrows from her enemy’s brain ; 


FRIENDSHIP. ' 261 

for into an enemy her irritable, suspicious, and self-conscious 
temper had already in her own thoughts raised Etoile. 

“ I don’t know anything about her,” she would say, with 
fine frankness, to her society. “ My father knows her a little, 
— ^yes ; but then he’s so good to all the world, and he always 
tries to believe the best of everybody. Of course she has 
wonderful talent, ,but she must have had a very strange life, 
all alone and among men so much, and hating women : where 
could she learn all she has done, too, and get all that passion 
of the verses, and the other things ? One wonders : that 
couldn’t all be got out of a breviary. Oh, I dare say what 
she says is true ; it may be, no doubt it is. Still, there must 
be a good deal more she doesn’t say; there must be. Oh, it 
matters so little to me, you know. If I can be of use to her, I 
don’t mind what people like to chatter about me. My friends 
know me and won’t misjudge me. As for the world, you 
know I never care a fig for it 1” 

This fiction, delivered as she could deliver her fictions, with 
a steadfast glance and an honest bluntness of tone, that car- 
ried conviction to her most skeptical listeners, was a seed 
which, falling on congenial soil, was certain to take root and 
bear its fitting fruit and flower. 

She never said anything direct ; oh, never anything direct 
in the least. On the contrary, she told every one that she 
was herself most tolerant, and was not bound to bo the judge 
of anybody, and had for her part seen so much of people of 
genius in her mother’s house, when she was quite a girl, that 
she saw no harm at all in any of their eccentricities. Still, here 
and there she would confide to her associates her distress that 
other people had not her tolerance and were ofiended at meet- 
ing Etoile. 

Society, which was always vaguely averse to Etoile, because 
she did not conciliate it, was very willing to receive such hints. 
There were high spheres of it,, indeed, where the fumes of 
such fictions could not reach, but through all the lower strata 
of it these fumes spread insidiously, like sulphur-smoke. 

Mrs. Phidias Pratt shook her head, not willing to do more 
till she was quite sure not to ofl'end Princess Vera by doing 
it ; Mrs. Macscrip and Mrs. Henry V. Clams, and the colo- 
nies they represented, said that all the dear Embassy people 
were nowadays so far too good-natured ; and the Scrope-Stair 


262 


FRIENDSHIP. 


sisters began to sigli, and hum and ha, and look sorrowful and 
mysterious, and murmur, “ Oh, don’t be afraid, don't ! She 
never comes to us on our day, she doesn’t, indeed ; and of 
course, if ever she did, we would take care there should be no 
risk of your speaking.” 

And Mr. Silverly Bell, with his softest voice and most purr- 
ing manner, carried his gentle countenance into many a decor- 
ous drawing-room, and dropped a hint, — just a hint : dear 
Lady Joan was too good-natured, dear Lord Archie was a 
trifle imprudent'; out of kindness, oh, yes, purest kindness, 
but a mistake ; no, he didn’t wish to say anything, he never 
said anything ; he was not a gossip, like dear Lady Cardiff ; 
nothing he abhorred more than gossip ; still, when he loved 
and valued any one as he did, — whoever it was he was call- 
ing on, — he thought it right to warn them from making any 
acquaintance they might hereafter regret. 

In a word, he earned his luncheons and dinners and petting 
in the Casa Challoner. All the Lady Joan’s pets had to work 
hard for her. 

This, however, did not, of course, prevent Mr. Silverly Bell 
from calling himself eagerly on Etoile, and drinking her tea 
with a slice of lemon in it, and feeling very comfortable by her 
fire, and pretending to adore her and Tsar. 

“ A man may go anywhere !” he would say, with a pretty 
deprecating little smile, when Mrs. Macscrip or Mrs. Middle- 
way would tax him with going very often to the Montecavallo 
to see “ that” woman. 

“ A man may go anywhere, and an old man, too !” he would 
say, charmingly, and look a little guilty, as if he saw and 
heard things in the rooms by the Bospigliosi gardens that 
were sadly tempting to the old Adam, old though it was in 
him. 

The spy of Society is an institution quite as useful to pri- 
vate ends as to political ones. As his reward. Lady Joan 
asked him to a dinner given for the Hebrides, and told Lady 
Hebrides he was her dear old Saint Paul. 

“ Bear, dear !” thought Lady Cardiff, when she saw these 
sulphur-fumes rising, “why didn’t she take a caprice for a 
married man, have a fancy for a drunken sculptor, go to nasty 
museums in men’s clothes, or anything of that kind ? They 
would have said nothing about her then. When a person is 


FRIENDSHIP. 


2G3 


famous the world will have stories of some sort. It’s better 
to give it something tangible ; it talks much less. Heavens ! 
if she’d only had a caprice for an attic and an artist, or spent 
six months with the married man, as 1 say, we should all be 
swearing her innocence till we were hoarse, — ^just as the dear 
Scrope-Stairs swear to Lady Joan’s. You ought never to dis- 
appoint the world. It is 2 l pieuvre, and has a million mouths ; 
you can’t shut them all • you can only give them something 
to suck.” 

Etoile, meanwhile, was serenely unconscious of all these 
threads netting, and mouths opening, about her feet, and, had 
she been conscious, would have been as serenely indifferent. 

She passed her days in great drpams and great studies ; the 
world was beautiful about her, and its past full of all the ter- 
rible and tender mysteries of the human soul ; every hour had 
for her some art to be pursued, some aim to be kept sight of ; 
she believed in a god 

** Qui puisse donncr un astre a un Sme innocent.” 

All the little conspiracies and petty cruelties of a Avorld of 
W'omen were noticed no more by her than were the gnats iu 
the air, or the dust on the stones, any day that she mounted 
the Scala Regia to gaze at the Sistina Sibyls. 

Lady Cardiff, who did not care much for the Sistina Sibyls, 
and who had said correctly that a grain of dust may blind you, 
ventured on a word of warning. 

“ You do not conciliate women,” she said, one day. “You 
do not think about them : oh, no, of course not ; but, believe 
me, a woman who does not is socially lost. Her sex will wait, 
— wait years, may-be, — but will fall on her like Destiny at 
last, and rend her in pieces, some way or another. To please 
our own sex we must either confer benefits or crave them ; 
we must be either patron or toady.” 

“ What a noble choice of parts you offer us I” 

Lady Cardiff was invulnerable to rebuke. 

“ Of course, to patronize is more agreeable,” she pursued, 
imperturbably. “ But I am not sure but what the toady in 
the long run gets most cakes and ale. Believe me, women 
hold the keys of the world for a woman ; but to get the keys 
you must crawl to their good will upon your knees, as the 
true believers up the Scala Sancta. To a fearless temper that 


264 


FRIENDSHIP. 


respects itself this is impossible, you say ? Yes, my dear, and 
that is just why frank and fearless spirits have generally such 
a very bad time of it in this world. There is only one way to 
deal with women : be very civil to their faces, and do them 
all the harm you can, especially behind their backs in a draw- 
ing-room ; never offend one, and never trust one ; kiss them 
as if they were your salvation, and watch them as if they were 
your assassins. ‘ Live with your friends, remembering they 
will one day be your enemies.’ Talleyrand’s advice is sound 
for our sex at all events. If you want a thing made public, 
tell it to three women separately in private ; cry ; say it will 
be ruin to you if it ever get known ; and by seven o’clock 
next day all the town will have heard of it. You may be 
quite satisfied of that. Women never like one another, ex- 
cept now and then an old woman and a young woman like you 
and me. They are good to one another among the poor, you 
say ? Oh, that I don’t know anything about. They may be. 
Barbarians always retain the savage virtues. In society women 
hate one another. All the more because in society they have 
to smile in each other’s faces every night of their lives. Only 
think what that is, my dear ! — to grudge each other’s con- 
quests, to grudge each other’s diamonds, to study each other’s 
dress, to watch each other’s wrinkles, to outshine each other 
always on every possible occasion, big or little, and yet always 
to be obliged to give pet names to each other, and visit each 
other with elaborate ceremonial. Why, women must hate each 
other 1 Society makes them. Your poor folks, I dare say, 
in the midst of their toiling and moiling, and scrubbing and 
scraping, and starving and begging, do do each other kindly 
turns, and put bread in each other’s mouths now and then, be- 
cause they can scratch each other’s eyes out, and call each other 
hussies in the streets, any minute they like, in the most open 
manner. But in society women’s entire life is a struggle for 
precedence in everything, — beauty, money, rank, success, dress, 
everything. We have to smother hate under smiles, and envy 
under compliment, and while we are dying to say ‘ you hussy,’ 
like the women in the street, we are obliged, instead of boxing 
her ears, to kiss her on both cheeks, and cry, ‘ Oh, my dear- 
est ! — how charming of you ! — so kind !’ Only think what 
all that repression means. You laugh ? Oh, you very clever 
jKiople always do laugh at these things. But you must study 


FRIENDSHIP. 


265 


Society, or suffer from it, sooner or later. If you don’t al- 
ways strive to go out before everybody, life will end in every- 
body going out before you ; everybody, — down to the shoe- 
black 1 Study Society, my love, or else do not come into it 
at all. To live like De Quincey or Wordsworth is compre- 
hensible, though I should fancy it very uncomfortable. But 
a middle way is idiocy. You only please neither the Hermits 
nor Vanity Fair.” 

“ Is it so very necessary to please anybody?” 

Lady Cardiff shrugged her shoulders. 

“ That depends, my dear, on one’s own desires. I should 
say it was very necessary ; Mrs. Henry V. Clams would say 
so. Lady Joan would say so, all Society would say so. But 
I’m sure I daren’t say it is for you. You don’t seem to care 
for all we care for : I believe Society seems to you no better 
than a Flemish kermesse.” 

“ Not half so good ! At a kermesse the children at least are 
genuine, with their gilded cakes and their merry-go-rounds. In 
our society the very children are hlasis before they are in their 
teens. Little Nadine Apraxine was invited to luncheon when 
I was with her the other day : she is eight years old. She 
came up to her mother and whispered, ‘ Make an excuse for 
me : I don’t wish to go : their cook is not good.’ ” 

“ A discerning child 1” said Lady Cardiff, with approval. 
“ An admirable child ! I wish she was my grand-daughter. 
She will have a future, that child. As for the rest of us, I 
am sure our cakes are gilt, my dear, we won’t touch them if 
they aren’t ; and we go round and round on the same wooden 
horse, God knows, every year of our lives ; we are very like 
the kermesse, after all. And we do enjoy ourselves ; you are 
mistaken if you think we don’t ; perhaps things look blue in 
the morning, that comes of the champagne and the chloral ; 
but by the time we get ‘ done up’ and begin our visits, we are 
really enjoying ourselves, and go on doing it till the small 
hours. Blas6^ of course, everybody is in a sense, but there’s 
always some ammonia to smell of that wakes us up : when 
we’re young the ammonia is coquetry, when we’re old it’s 
scandal. When we’ve got our eyebrows neatly drawn, and our 
eyes nicely washed with kohl, and are ready for the kermesse, 
we jump on one or other of the wooden horses, and away we 
go to a ‘ rosy time,’ as the racing men say. I don’t think 
M 23 


266 


FRIENDSHIP. 


people get tired ; not in your sense : bless you, little Nadine 
Apraxine will never tire of finding that her friends’ cooks are 
bad, till she hasn’t a tooth left that isn’t a false one to mumble 
her dinner. The joy of disparagement never dies till we die. 
There are two things that nobody ever tires of : they are the 
pleasures of excelling and of depreciating.” 

“Excelling! — it is rather a Dead Sea apple, I fear. The 
effort is happiness, but the fruit always seems poor.” 

Lady Cardiff could not patiently hear such nonsense. 

“ There you are again, my dear feminine Alceste,” she said, 
irritably, “ looking at things from your solitary stand-point on 
that rock of yours in the middle of the sea. You are think- 
ing of the excelling of genius, of the possession of an ideal 
fame, of the ‘ huntress mightier than the moon,’ and I am 
thinking of the woman who excels in Society, — who has the 
biggest diamonds, the best chef, the most lovers, the most 
chic and chien, who leads the fashion, and condescends when 
she takes tea with an empress. But even from your point 
of view on your rock, I can’t quite believe it. Accom- 
plished ambition must be agreeable. To look back and say, 
‘ I have achieved 1’ — what leagues of sunlight sever that 
proud boast from the weary sigh, ‘ I have failed 1’ Fame must 
console.” 

“ Perhaps ; but the world, at least, does its best that it 
should not. Its glory discs are of thorns.” 

“ You mean that superiority has its attendant shadow, which 
is calumny ? Always has had, since Apelles painted. What 
does it matter, if everybody looks after you when you pass 
down a street, what they say when you pass ?” 

“ A malefactor may obtain that sort of flattery. I do not 
see the charm of it.” 

“ You are very perverse. Of course I talk of an unsullied 
fame, not of an infamous notoriety.” 

“ Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety,” said Etoile, 
with a certain scorn, “and it is dearly bought, perhaps too 
dearly, by the sacrifice of the serenity of obscurity, the loss of 
the peace of private life. Art is great and precious, but the 
pursuit of it is sadly embittered when we have become so the 
plaything of the public, through it, that the simplest actions 
of our lives are chronicled and misconstrued. You do not be- 
lieve it, perhaps, but I often envy the women sitting at their 


FRIENDSHIP. 267 

cottage doors, witli their little children on their knees : no one 
talks of themP' 

J’ai tant de gloire, 6 roi, que j'aspire au fumier !” 

said Lady Cardiff. “ You are very thankless to Fate, my 
dear ; but I suppose it is always so.” 

And Lady Cardiff took refuge in her cigar-case, being a 
woman of too much experience not to know that it is quite 
useless to try and make converts to your opinions, and especi- 
ally impossible to convince people dissatisfied with their good 
fortune that they ought to be charmed with it. 

“ It is very curious,” she thought, when she got into her 
own carriage, “ really it makes one believe in that odd doc- 
trine of — what is it? — Compensations; but certainly, people 
of great talent always are a little mad. If they’re not flight- 
ily mad with eccentricity and brandy, they are morbidly 
mad with solitude and sentiment. Now, she is a great crea- 
ture, really a great creature, might have the world at her 
feet if she liked ; and all she cares for is a big dog, a 
bunch of roses, and some artist or poet dead and gone 
three hundred or three thousand years ! It is very queer. 
It is just like that extraordinary possession of Victor Hugo’s : 
with powers that might have sufficed to make ten men bril- 
liant and comfortable, he must vex and worry about politics 
that didn’t concern him in the least, and go and live under a 
skylight in the middle of the sea. It is very odd. They 
are never happy ; but when they are unhappy, and you 
tell them that Addison could be a great writer and yet live 
comfortably and enjoy the things of this world, they only tell 
you contemptuously that Addison had no genius, he had only 
a Style. I suppose he hadn’t. I think if I were one of them, 
and had to choose, I would rather have only a Style, too.” 

That night Lady Cardiff went to a very big dinner at Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams’s, — the dinner which Etoile had declined. 
Fontebranda had arranged it, as he arranged everything, from 
the ball she once gave an imperial prince to the tisane she 
took when she caught a chill ; and on this night it was an 
unspeakably grand affair, all ablaze with princes and ministers. 

“ We married women have a good time out here,” Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams, in her dressing-room a few hours before, 
wrote to a sister in the States. “ If I’d stayed at home I’d 


268 


FRIENDSHIP. 


have been set away among the old folks long ago ; girls are all 
the go in New York ; in Europe girls aren’t nowhere ; it’s 
right down horrid to see ’em, batches and batches of ’em, and 
not a man to waltz with ’em if there’s a married woman got a 
clean place on her ticket. You should see Heloise B. Dobbs, 
you remember her shooting that fine young man in St. Louis : 
she’s fifty, as you know, if she’s an hour ; my dearest dear, 
she wears lower dresses than any of us, half a foot below the 
shoulder-blades, and you’ll leave her spinning like a steam- 
wheel in the cotillon if you slope off any minute before day- 
dawn.” 

And Mrs. Henry V. Clams, having poured so much truth 
into the bosom of her sister in New York, had herself arrayed 
in white talFetas embroidered in silver with rosebuds and 
humming-birds, and, with humming-birds on her shoulders, 
humming-birds in her hair, and humming-birds on her shoes, 
went down to her big dinner, and met Mrs. Heloise B. Dobbs, 
who, with a narrow strap about her waist, and an infinitesimal 
strap over each shoulder, made up in diamonds what she lacked 
in dress, and each cried to the other, “ My dearest dear I 
How lovely you look !” and each thought of the other, “ The 
Jezebel ! the girls would lynch her down home !” 

The dinner was a great success : all that Mrs. Henry V. 
Clams did was a success, thanks to Fontebranda. Comet 
clarets, Highland salmon, pines from Covent Garden, and 
everything else from Paris, was Alberto Fontebranda’s recipe 
for making Society smile, and Society always smiled very 
sweetly. Mr. Henry V. Clams sometimes, paying the bills, 
did not smile ; but then nobody minded what he did or did not. 

“ What ’d you bring me to Europe for, if I aren’t to make 
a figger in it ?” said his wife, very sensibly. “ It’s puSectly 
daft to cry out as you do : you can’t make a figger for nothing, 
and your pile’s as big as the Catskills !” 

And Mr. Henry V. Clams was silenced, because it was 
sweet to hi-m also to make a figure, if only vicariously, and to 
entertain princes, even if they never distinguished him from 
his footmen. 

He made a struggle once to sit at the bottom of his own 
table, but resigned even that because Fontebranda told him, 
contemptuously, “ Tout cela cost changS maiiitenant, passe de 
mode tout d fait /” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


269 


Mr. Henry V. Clams felt that in New York he would have 
tried a playful six-shooter on his familiar friend Fontebranda. 

But he was in Europe, and wished to make a figure. So, 
without disputing, he sat at the side, and felt incongruous and 
jostled, and could never be brought to understand that, his 
wife being opposite to him, the sides were the top and the 
bottom ; but he had to sit there, and supposed it was Fashion. 
She had always Fontebranda on her left hand, and some illus- 
trious being on her right : that was Fashion too. 

Mr. Henry V. Clams would have been happier eating dev- 
illed tomatoes in Helmonico’s. 

When the great dinner was over, and the big bow-wow folks 
(as Mrs. Henry V. Clams would call them sometimes when 
her spirits were high and her Fashion forgotten) were all de- 
parted, Mr. Henry V. Clams bowing on the top of his stairs, 
and being supposed by most to be a groom of the chamber too 
nervous for his place, the inner life of the Palazzo Clams 
came coyly from its hiding-place out on to the hearth ; that is 
to say, whiskey, rum, and “pick-me-ups” were rolled in with 
card-tables, cigar-boxes were opened, and a little roulette- wheel 
began to turn for those who liked it. 

A dozen people, intimate friends, remained, and the host 
and hostess were always willing to lose their money for those 
who helped them to make a figure. Mr. Henry V. Clams 
rattled the napoleons in his trousers pocket, spat furtively into 
a Swiss jardiniere, drank a choice drink called “ wake-the- 
dead,” and began to feel once more an independent citizen. 

“ Alberto,” said his wife. 

“ Ma tres-cMre .^” responded Fontebranda. 

“ That’s been a big thing I” 

“ Bien reussi, ckhre, mais ouV* 

“ But there’s one thing riles me, right down riles me,” said 
Mrs. Henry V. Clams, also sipping the “ wake-the-dead.” 

“ I know,” said the voice of her husband, solemnly. “The 
canvas-backs wanted green ginger. I guess you don’t get 
ginger green in this country ?” 

The idiocy of this remark passed unnoticed, because no one 
ever noticed his remarks unless it was absolutely necessary to 
reprove or instruct him. 

“ Biles !” echoed Fontebranda. “ Cela veut dire — riles?” 

“ Qui m'agace,'" explained Mrs. Henry V. Clams, pronouncing 
23 * 


270 


FRIENDSHIP. 


it with a fine breadth of tone as mag-ass. “ Qui m' enrage ! 
There was a German serene, a Russian own-cousin-to-the- 
throne, a French marshal, an English peeress, two embassies, 
and the Lord knows how many of your own dukes and princes, 
Alberto, and yet with all those that woman wouldn’t come !” 

“ Woman? woman ? Mais qui done?"' said the Count Al- 
berto, staring hard over his halo of smoke. 

“ Etoile !” 

“ Bah 1” said Fontebranda, with scorn. 

“ Oh, you may ‘ bah !’ ” retorted his sovereign mistress, as 
she threw her own cigarette fiercely into a cluster of azaleas. 

“ It riles me ; it makes me downright mad 1 Are those first- 
class prize-trotters to dine here, and that one-horse concern, 
an artist., to say no ?” 

Lady Joan Challoner, who was lying back in an arm-chair 
smoking, with loris on one side of her, and Eccelino di Sestri 
and Douglas Graeme on the other, took her cigar out of her 
teeth, and smiled pleasantly. 

“ Dear Mrs. Clams, what can it matter ? I think she 
showed good feeling, for once. I wish she’d showed as much 
for us, and never brought her letters to me !” 

The face of loris grew paler even than was its wont, and 
his brows contracted, as he sat on the arm of her chair. 

He was silent, and was ashamed of his silence. 

He felt false to his fairest faith ; he felt a coward and un- 
true, yet his lips remained closed. 

Mrs. Henry V. Clams, whose spirits were high, owing to 
the success of her “ big thing” and the draught of the “ wake- 
the-dead,” threw one knee over the other comfortably as she 
leaned back in her chair and smoked her cigarette. 

“ Dear Lady Joan, now, do tell !” she said, confidently. 
“ Come now, do tell ; we’re all ong iiitim here, and nobody ’ll 
go and say anything. Who was she ? do tell ! I’ll bet you 
know.” 

Lady Joan looked sorrowful, and settled the spilla in her 
hair. 

“ N — no, I don’t,” she said, slowly. “ At least, you know, 
not positively, and I don’t want to do her any harm : why 
should I ? Of course I’ve heard a good many stories, who 
hasn’t? but artists are always like that, you know, and of 
course she could not be the anatomist she is without — well. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


271 


without very queer studies. Look how she must have studied 
the nude ! Been in the most horrible anatomical museums 
and academies. No doubt must have been !” she said, in con- 
clusion, with a touching modesty, though on some occasions 
she vowed she despised all Prudes, and had hung up behind 
her seat at her dinner-table a most unblushing and colossal 
Nudity, which she called Titian’s “ Choice of Paris.” But 
then these trifling incongruities never disturbed her : she knew 
that Mrs. Grundy does not mind a few incongruities. 

Besides, Titian lived ever so long ago : nobody can help 
what he painted. 

And then (which made such a difference also) the nudity 
was the joint property of herself and Mimo and Trillo, — a 
gigantic speculation bought between them, just when the In- 
specteur des Beaux-Arts was expected from St. Petersburg. 
The Inspecteur des Beaux-Arts was not impressed with the 
nudity, and would not buy it for the Hermitage, so it still 
hung behind the Lady Joan at dinner, waiting some more 
enlightened Inspecteur, or some billionnaire, come out of a 
foundry, or a lead-mine, with a love of the arts. 

“ Oh, my ! that’s real shocking !” said Mrs. Henry V. Clams, 
awed by the word “ anatomical.” She was not sure what it 
meant ; it was vaguely associated in her mind with a travelling 
showman in the Far West, who had gone about with a skull, 
and some monstrosities in glass bottles, and a dried alligator 
out of the swamps. 

“ But that don’t tell us who she was,” she pursued, her 
thirst of curiosity stimulated by a second draught of the 
“ wake-the-dead.” 

“ Oh, as for that,” said the Lady Joan, with a fine careless- 
ness, “ it wouldn’t matter who she was, if she’d always lived 
decently. I can tell you who she was, if you care about it so 
much. She was a little girl picked off the streets by old Is- 
raels, — ^you know, the French painter; her mother was an ‘ un- 
fortunate,’ and Israels tumbled over the child on the sill of a 
wine-shop. That’s the simple truth. But of course that 
wouldn’t matter, if when she’d grown up she’d kept straight.” 

Lady Joan blew some smoke into the air after this perform- 
ance of her imagination. She had invented it quite on the 
spur of the moment, and felt that hours of reflection could not 
have enabled her to hit on anything better. She saw the face 


272 


FRIENDSHIP. 


of loris pale, eager, and almost stern, as he strove to listen, but 
she spoke in her own tongue, rapidly, and he failed to follow 
her. 

“ That is the real truth,” she added, “because a great friend 
of old Israels’s told me ; he’d seen the child, a dirty little brat, 
tumbling about in the old man’s atelier when Israels first took 
her home.” 

“ Oh, my !” said Mrs. Henry V. Clams again, almost gasp- 
ing with the effects of her surprise and the “ wake-the-dead.” 
“ Oh, my I And yet she gives herself such highfalutin’ airs ! 
Well, I do like that ! My word, I’d like to tell her !” 

Lady Joan looked at her hostess and at all her other list- 
eners with an honest, frank light in her steadfast eyes. 

“ Well, you know, I, for one, would never reproach her 
with that. Could she help what she was born ? What I do 
dislike knowing her for is that, though certainly she has a 
certain amount of talent, she never would have been heard of 
if she hadn’t been much too indulgent to certain great persons 
who can give fame with their nod ; and I know that half — 
more than half — of the accuracy and the beauty of her 
pictures, and in consequence all their celebrity, is due to the 
talent of an obscure lover of hers, a certain Pierre Gerarde, a 
great colorist, who works them up and lets them go out in her 
name. It is so vilely dishonest, you know ; it really hurts one 
to think of it.” 

“ Lord ! then even her pictures aren’t her own !” gasped 
Mrs. Henry V. Clams, in the extremity of her stupefaction 
resorting once more to the “ wake-the-dead.” 

Mr. Henry V. Clams, listening on the hearth, spit softly 
once more into the azaleas. 

“ Uncommon kind of that young man,” he said, dryly. 
“ That young man must be a real Christian. Where was he 
riz, that very liberal young man, my lady ?” 

Lady Joan colored a little. 

“ He is a Belgian, I believe,” she said, hurriedly. “ But 
everybody knows it perfectly well in Paris.” 

“ Then they must be darned fools in Paris to make a fuss 
over the wrong critter,” said Mr. Henry V. Clams. “ I believe 
they’ve a prize for Virtue : they oughter crown that most un- 
common young man.” 

“ Hold your tongue, Mr. Clams, and don’t be so vulgar,” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


273 


said his wife, whilst Fontebranda, weary of a conversation in 
a tongue he could not comprehend, elfected a diversion by 
rolling up the roulette-table a little nearer. 

Lady Joan, who never gambled, — she liked nothing that 
was uncertain, — took her leave and went home with her friend. 

loris never spoke. He had not very clearly understood, 
but he had gathered the drift of her words enough to feel 
angered with her and ashamed of himself. In silence they 
rolled through the dark midnight towards the Casa Challoner. 
Lady Joan was wondering if she had gone too far in the bril- 
liant invention of Pierre Gerarde, but she was not much afraid. 
She knew that a lie makes so many friends : it is such a common 
pastime, and begets such a fellow-feeling in everybody. When 
a lie is found out, nobody is so angry with the teller of it as 
everybody is with the worrying and uncompromising truth- 
teller ; Ae is a bore if you like. 

“ A cullender is not hindered by a hole more or less,” says 
the Eastern proverb ; and she knew that society likes cullen- 
ders, — if you will only pour dirty water through them. 

Looking at the profile of loris in the uncertain, faint gleam 
of the light from the lamps, she mutely debated within herself 
whether she might translate her fiction of Pierre Gerarde and 
try it on him. But on reflection she desisted : he might go 
and tell Etoile. They drove home in an unbroken silence. 

“ Aren’t you coming up, To ?” she said, in surprise, as he 
turned away from her at the bottom of her own staircase. 

“No!” said loris, curtly. “And I think — I think, ma 
clihre^ that you might respect the names of those who are your 
guests and take your hand in friendship ; that is all. Felicis- 
sima notte F 

She, stupefied with amazement and choked with rising fury, 
stood under the rays of her staircase lamp, gazing into the 
vacancy of the dark entrance-hall, as the dull sound of the 
closing door echoed through the house and woke Mr. Challoner, 
sleeping the sleep of the just and dreaming dreams of the 
Share List. 

“ My God ! does he care for her .^” she thought. In the 
dull midnight a new light broke in upon her ; but it could not 
pierce very far through the triple folds of her own supreme 
vanity. 


M* 


274 


FRIENDSHIP. 


CHAPTER XXII. 

The next day was stormy and cold. 

The mild and sunny weather which had graced the Carnival 
was passing away as the Carnival drew to its close, and the 
bitter winds were sweeping in from the ravines of the Abruzzi 
and the Apennines, and driving the brown Tiber into sullen 
swell. 

loris came out of his house in the teeth of the wind, and 
felt weary and chilly. He had been sitting in his own room, 
under the watchful eyes of the portrait there, and striving to 
wade through a mass of papers, in the vain endeavor to un- 
derstand his own position and responsibilities in regard to 
those mighty international works by the Gulf of Faro to 
which he had been persuaded to put his name. All that he 
could thoroughly understand was that his money was sinking 
into the sands of Faro, as the piles were sinking there. 

That he had lost money was usually the only clear convic- 
tion that remained to him as a result of all the enterprises into 
which he was launched. That he would not let others lose 
money, through him or by him, was the only resolve, strong 
enough and fixed enough in his mind, to resist all the influ- 
ences that were around him and that labored to shake it in 
him. The conviction and the resolve together were not peace- 
ful mental food. He was not used to thought of this kind : 
his past was full of very different memories. 

To lead a cotillon at the Tuileries, to fight a duel at the 
frontier, to string a guitar in a moonlit garden, to study paint- 
ing in an old Academy, to view the beauty of a court, to talk 
music with the Abbe Liszt, to exchange courtly ceremonials 
with cardinals, to rove through Alpine valleys with a hunter 
king, — these made up a life like a Boccaccio story, like a 
pageant-picture of Carpaccio or Bordone indeed, but they 
were no meet preparation for the lore of the financial world, 
for the gambling of the board-room and the share-market. 

The dizzy figures made his eyes ache, the endless letters 
made his brain dull. He knew what ruin meant, and some- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


275 


thing that was not unlike ruin looked at him from the col- 
umns of numerals, from the piles of correspondence. He 
knew also that on his estate the columns of loss and of profit 
were far from equal ; that in the matter of Fiordelisa expen- 
diture was not met by any return ; every pineapple cost him 
about fifty francs, and every pineapple was given away to some 
friend, — not his own. The pineapples were a sample of the 
rest. 

He sat and studied the dreary figures that filled sheet after 
sheet, from the bills paid for the pineapple-beds to the ac- 
counts for the bridge by the Gulf of Faro, and he felt bewil- 
dered and wearied. With a sword, with a paint-brush, with 
a crabbed musical score, with an abstruse Italian or Latin 
poem, with a tender woman’s hand stealing into his own, he 
would have known what to do ; but with accounts and with 
finance I 

loris rose, having wasted his day, and having no surer idea 
of what he was committed to in the present, or of what he 
had better do in the future, than if he had never wasted a 
morning of freedom over those hateful masses of arithmetic 
and correspondence. His head ached, and his heart ached 
too. 

He was free, for his tyrant was gone, on the arm of hand- 
some Douglas Graeme, with Silverly Bell as Propriety, to a 
classical concert given for a charity by Lady Anne Monmouth- 
shire at her rooms in her hotel, and, the concert ended, was to 
dine with the Dean of St. Edmund’s, at the same great hotel, 
in that decorous attention to the decorums of the world which 
no passion, pleasure, or naughtiness ever made the Lady Joan 
omit, any more than passion, pleasure, or naughtiness made 
ladies of the Borgian era neglect their fasts or fail to make 
their plenary confession. 

By mere instinct as he left his house, fatigued and out of 
spirits, his steps bore him down the crowded Corso to the old 
palace on the Horses’ Hill, where so much of the stifled 
romance and resolve of his vanished youth seemed to arise for 
him as he crossed his threshold. 

In an earlier time he had always made some excuse to his 
conscience, — some painting, some book, some flower, some 
gallery hard of access, for which he brought admittance, some 
treasure of art unknown to the general student, of which he 


276 


FRIENDSHIP. 


brought tidings ; but for some time he had now neglected to 
use these pleas, unless interrogated by his tyrant, and he en- 
tered the house of Etoile familiarly and so frequently that the 
servants had ceased to go through any formula, and threw the 
doors open to him without bidding. 

To-day it was five o’clock. Etoile was out, but would be 
home in a few moments, so they said. He went in, and cast 
himself on a couch and waited. 

The silence, the fragrance, the soft shadows of the room 
soothed him ; the dog, lying asleep, looked up and welcomed 
him lazily, then slept again ; there were wet sketches, open 
books, fresh flowers, countless things that spoke to him as if 
they had voices of their absent mistress. He took up a volume 
that lay face downwards near him. 

It was the “ Nelida” of Daniel Stern. 

It was open at that true and eloquent passage which seems 
to vibrate with the deep scorn of a courageous nature for the 
careful egotism of a cowardly one. 

“ Marcher environnie des hommages qiie le rtionde prodigue 
aux apparences hgpocrites ; jouir d V ombre d'un mensonge de 
laches et furtlfs plaisirs ; ce sont Id les vulgaires sagesses de 
ces femmes qne la Nature a faites egalement impuissantes 
pour le hien quelles reconnaissent et pour le mal qui les seduit ; 
egalement incapahles ■ de soumission ou de rivolte^ aussi 
depourvues du courage qui se resigne d porter des chaines 
que de la hardiesse qui sefforce d les hriser.^^ 

“ It is a portrait of Joan,” thought loris, and put the book 
down impatient to be reminded of what, here, he desired to 
forget. Yet it moved him to pleasure to think that Etoile 
had been reading it ; a pencil line scored by the passage told 
him that she also must have been thinking of “ ces vulgaires 
sagesses'' of the woman who claimed his allegiance, and per- 
haps been resenting them for his sake. 

It was sweet to his sense of power to know that she should 
care thus ; it gave him a fuller consciousness of triumph to 
feel that this woman, so long above all human envies and 
enmities, stooped to both through his influence and for his 
sake. And he mis-read in a measure the emotions that moved 
her. Though, in a sense, jealousy of the woman who had 
absorbed and charmed his life, it was far more a scornful im- 
patience of the vice that cloaked itself as virtue, of the tim- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


277 


orous time-serving that loved the world better than passion 
or candor. The contempt of the courageous temper for the 
coward’s is seldom understood ; the impatience of courage for 
the craven meanness of a lie is seldom rightly measured. 

loris thought she was jealous as other women were ; but he 
was wrong. 

“ Dear me !” said the voice of Lady Cardiff at that instant 
on the threshold of the chamber. Although a person who 
was never surprised at anything, she was so surprised to see 
him there that the ejaculation escaped her. 

“How very much at home he looks ! more than he ever 
does in the other place,” she thought to herself, as loris rose 
to meet her with that gay and graceful greeting which so well 
became him. 

“ My dear Prince, charmed to see you. I only looked in 
for five minutes ; they said she’d be here in a moment. Pretty 
rooms, aren’t they ? and what quantities of flowers ! head- 
aching, but pretty,” said Lady Cardiff, as she seated herself on 
a couch opposite to him, and took out her cigarette-case. 
“ Will you have one ? Don’t she let you ? She lets me. 
Horrid weather; isn’t it? I have just come from Lady 
Anne’s concert ; they have been tuning their instruments two 
hours, — at least I thought it was tuning their instruments ; 
but they said it was Op. 101, Motifs on B flat. Very beau- 
tiful, they said. Queer thing, isn’t it ? that the pretty things 
that please one are all irretrievably wrong, and everything that 
sets one’s teeth on edge, and scratches through one’s brain 
like a metallic tooth comb, is scientifically exquisite. I don’t 
profess to understand it ; I suppose nightingales are all wrong, 
aren’t they ? And yet one likes to hear them. Myself, I 
prefer a nightingale to Op. 101. Your friends the Challoners 
were there ; at least the lady was : she it was who told me 
that it was Op. 101.” 

“ Lady Joan is fond of music,” said loris, feeling irritated 
beyond endurance at the bare mention of a name that in this 
hour he had hoped peacefully to forget. 

“ Oh, that’s being fond of music, is it ? to shoot the night- 
ingales and like Op. 101. She does shoot the nightingales 
up at your place, doesn’t she ? I’ve heard so. But I’m sure 
^ou like the birds better than the metallic tooth comb, don’t 
you ?” 


24 


278 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“I am a countryman of the melodists,” said loris, with a 
smile. “ I plead guilty to thinking the delight of the ear the 
first charm of all music: you know it is a rococo opinion 
scorned by all modern science.” 

“ Oh, I know ; I know,” said Lady Cardiff. “ The night- 
ingales are to be summoned before School Boards, I believe, and 
educated out of their perverse trick of being harmonious. Ours 
is a delightful age : each of us is merely an egg, or an atom, or 
a gas (il rCy a pas heaucoup d clioisir. I think the egg’s the 
least humiliating of the three), and Thought is only a mere 
secretion like bile, and Mind is only a grayish sort of sponge 
under the skull, and it is only an accidental crease in the 
sponge that makes it a Oenius, a crease another way would 
have made it an idiot; and yet, poor wretches as we are, 
made up of only gas and a creased sponge, we are required to 
be capable of appreciating Op. 101 ! Now, that is really 
absurd, you know. Don’t you think so ? By the way, how 
did the gas-and-sponge that we unhappy accidents of evolution 
call the Count Milliadine, get on at the court to-day? Is he 
liked?” 

The Count Milliadine was a new Russian Minister who had 
been officially received that morning : loris had conducted the 
reception : apropos of the reception Lady Cardiff plunged 
into politics, which she thought much more diverting than 

Op. 101. 

loris, who himself thought even Op. 101 less odious than 
politics, suited himself to her mood with that gracious adapt- 
ability of which he had learned the trick at courts, but Lady 
Cardiff, to her amusement, saw his eyes ever and again turning 
to a Louis Quinze clock on its bracket. 

In a quarter of an hour’s time Etoile returned from her 
drive, and brought a fragrance of fresh-gathered violets into 
the chamber with her : she had been in the Dorian woods 
with Princess Vera and her children. 

Lady Cardiff watched the silent greeting exchanged between 
her and loris, affecting herself to be entirely engrossed with 
a fusee that would not strike. 

“ Ah, ah,” thought she, wise in such signs, and swift to 
read them. “ That is it, is it? Well, why not? Only there 
will be the very mischief to pay in the other place. And 
will he be strong enough to battle through rough weather? 


FRIENDSHIP. 


279 


A bully like that dear woman that loves Op. 101 wants such 
a bully to beat her !” 

Aloud, she only said, — 

Dear me, how tiresome these fusees are ! Cher Prince, 
have you a light ? A thousand thanks. Violets ! what a 
quantity ! but how unpleasantly wet ! You can buy them at 
the street-corner. Not the same thing as gathering them? 
No? Now, I should have fancied it much more agreeable. 
But that is one of the things that are like Op. 101 to me. 
You didn’t hear about Op. 101 ? I have been telling loris : 
I thought they hadn’t finished tuning the fiddles, and it 
seemed the concert was over when I didn’t know it had 
begun. Oh, thanks, my love, no : I must go, really. I only 
waited for you ten seconds, because I wanted to hear about,” 
etc., etc. 

And she proceeded to explain some errand about a book of 
French memoirs promised to some Russian invalid ; a mere 
nothing. She had come, intending to have an hour’s com- 
fortable chat over the fire in twilight ; but she comprehended 
that one at least of them was wishing her absent, and Lady 
Cardiff was too sympathetic and too well bred not to catch a 
situation in a glance and conform herself to its exigencies at 
all personal sacrifice. She bowed herself out with admirable 
tact, just staying long enough to look hurried and forced to 
go, — quite naturally, — and Toris took her to her carriage. 

“ Dear me!” said Lady Cardiff, to herself, once more, when 
alone amidst her cushions. “ There will be the mischief to 
pay with a vengeance. What a pity he is hampered like 
that 1 — such a nice-looking man, and such admirable manners, 
in a day when manners are scarcely more than a tradition, and 
everybody shuffles about in slippers, slippers that are down 
at heel too, for the most part. What a pity I There is 
nothing in the world so hard to get rid of as the nineteenth- 
century Guinevere, when she has made a domestic animal of 
the marital dragon and knows that Arthur will never say 
anything unless Launcelot seems likely to leave her on his 
hands. Poor Launcelot 1 If he ever do get into the news- 
papers everybody is horrified at him, and full of sympathy for 
the dragon, but it is Launcelot that is to be pitied ; fifty to 
one Guinevere threw herself at his head, went down to his 
rooms, wrote to him at his club, did all kinds of silly things, 


280 


FRIENDSHIP. 


and when she grew theatrical threatened him with Arthur. 
I shouldn’t in the least wonder if even Mr. Challoner were to 
grow into the ‘ wronged Pendragon’ if ever they find out that 
Guinevere has to clear out of Fiordelisa.” 

And Lady Cardiff settled herself among her cushions, and 
tried to read a “ Journal pour Hire,” by the fading light of 
the day, as her carriage rumbled through the streets of Home, 
but failed to be able to keep her mind to it, partly from want 
of light, partly from wonder as to the sentiments she had 
detected. 

“ The ‘ wronged Pendragon’ will be very fine,’’ she thought 
to herself. “ It will be so very fine if only by contrast with 
Arthur’s ‘ boundless trust’ 1” 

And the idea amused her much more than did the “ Jour- 
nal amusant.” 

Meantime loris had returned to the rooms that the wet 
violets were filling with their fragrance. 

Etoile had thrown aside her furs, and stood with the fire 
light playing on her uncovered head, and the straight folds of 
her velvet skirt as she placed the violets in old shallow porce- 
lain bowls, the dog lying at her feet. 

“ They were the last of the year, I fear,” she said to him, 
as he returned. “ The tulips are all out under the oak woods 
to-day. I care most for the violets. I remember how bitterly 
I used to cry when I was a little child, and our old servant 
threw them into syrups to boil them down : to buy them at 
street-corners seems nearly as bad. Do you understand ? or 
is it all Op. 101 to you?” 

“ I understand,” he said, with a smile and a sigh. ‘‘ May 
I stay here a little while ? I am tired. Figuratively, I have 
been at street-corners all the day, buying and selling. I feel 
dull, chilly, and jaded. May I stay ?” 

“ Of course.” The color flushed her face a little. She 
went on putting the violets in their shallow bowls beside 
the hearth. His eyes dwelt on her with musing tenderness, 
and followed the movements of her hands under their old lace 
ruflBes among the forest flowers with the water-drops sparkling 
on her fingers like diamonds. 

“ Why do you wear no rings ?” he asked, abruptly. 

She laughed a little. 

“ Vanity 1 They spoil the hand ; they disguise it.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 281 

“ That is a sculptor’s idea ; I think it is a right one. Your 
hands are too beautiful to need ornament ” 

“ Or compliment.” 

“ Truth is not compliment. I never use the language of 
compliment to you; you know that very well. Tell me, — 
you have been reading that book of Daniel Stern’s — ‘ Ne- 
lida’?” 

“ Yes. It is not a very clever book, though written by a 
clever woman. But ” 

“ It has one passage that is eloquent. Did you think of 
me when you marked it ?” 

“ Yes.” 

He stretched his hand out to the book and read the 
passage again, in silence. Then with a sigh he tossed it 
away. 

“ She might have sat for the picture,” he said, with con- 
tempt. 

“ It is not right of you to say that !” Etoile said, quickly, 
with a sense of pleasure in his wrong-doing that she blamed, 
for which she was impatient and scornful of herself. “ It is 
like her, no doubt; it is like ten thousand other women, 
probably ; it is like all the feeble passions of the world which 
wear the cloak of convenience and the mask of a vulgar wis- 
dom ; but it is not for you to say so, since you bear with her 
as she is.” 

“ Why? since we are speaking with our hands in the 
Bocca della Veritd to-night ?” said loris, his voice hissing a 
little between his teeth. “ And, even if cowardly it be, you 
know very well slaves are always cowards ; their tyrants make 
them so, and cannot complain. No !” he said, quickly, chang- 
ing his tone to a soft supplication, “ do not say cruel things to 
me. I cannot bear them from you. Perhaps I am ignoble 
and unmanly. Before you I feel so.” 

“ It is not before me. It is before yourself,” she said, in a 
low voice, as she returned to the hearth and stood in the 
flickering light from the burning logs. “ Your name is noble, 
not only with the mere nobility of rank, but with all the 
inherited nobility of knightly actions and of chivalrous tem- 
pers ; because the material greatness of your house may have 
vanished, that is but a reason the more to sustain it high in 
the respect of the world and the honor of men ; you are not 


282 


FRIENDSHIP. 


free to be ridiculed, you are not free to be despised ; you 
represent the honor of a thousand years of knighthood that 
stands or falls with you. It is not before me that you should 
feel your self-surrender to an ignoble passion shameful : it is 
before yourself and before the memory of your forefathers I” 
loris listened, with his head bent and his eyes drooped. 

“No other woman ever spoke to me like that,” he said, 
under his breath ; and was silent, leaning his arm on the old 
yellow marble of the mantel-piece. 

“ It should not be what women say ; it should be what 
your own heart tells you. You have so much heritage of 
greatness in your old race, so many memories to incite and 
ennoble you; your country-people love you, and you love 
them ; there are so many beautiful possibilities in your own 

future ; your life on your own lands might be ” 

“ When my future is her prey, as the present is, and every 
rood of my land is blighted by her !” he muttered, wearily. 
“ Ah, you do not understand : once I too thought as you 
think, and dreamed of great things, or at least of a life not 
unworthy of great memories ; but Society eats away all nobil- 
ity, and makes us shiftless, vacuous, worthless, and insincere 
as itself. What are women ? Only delicate pretty triflers, 
or mere beasts of prey, that excite our baser desires and teach 
us to stifle our higher natures, lest we should make them 
yawn. You will say it is unmanly to lay blame upon your 
sex. Perhaps it is. But before such a woman as you are, one 
learns to feel what men might be if women were more like 
you. You tell me it is cowardly to say that those words of 
that book describe the one woman who more than any other 
has dragged my life down to a lower level and laid it waste 
and barren of all hope. It is not her fault : she cannot help 
being what nature made her : no one can give more than they 
have in them. Yet it is the truth, the merest, coldest truth. 
What is her love for me beyond such passion as a tigress 
knows, and, even so, forever second to her worldly interests 

and worship of herself ” 

“ Hush ! hush ! It is not loyal ” 

He laughed aloud. 

“ Loyal ! I am as loyal to her as she to me. Believe me, 
in a guilty passion that dares the world there may be loyalty, 
because there may be strength ; but in such an intrigue as 


FRIENDSHIP. 


283 


hers and mine, public as marriage, yet steeped in hypocrisies 
of social lies, there can be no faithfulness, because to each 
other, to ourselves, and to Society, we are false, — false in every 
caress, in every word, in every thought, — a very hell of false- 
hood 1” 

“ Hush !” 

“ Why ? Let me speak the truth to you at least. No 
woman ever influenced me as you do. I think you could 
make me what you would if I were always near you. You 
are like the flowers you love : you speak to men of the God 
they have forgotten. The flowers do not know what they do, 
neither do you. Are you ofiended ? Forgive me.” 

Etoile was silent for a moment. 

“ Ofiended ? No ; not that. But it is not just to her. 
Besides, you do not mean it.” 

“ Let her take care of herself : she is well able. Do I not 
mean what I say of you? Look at me and see.” 

She did look at him, with the calm, frank, candid regard 
with which she had looked always in the face of men. Their 
passions had never moved her, and she had controlled them 
or dismissed them without effort. Before the deep dreamy 
gaze of his eyes, caressing, ardent, mysterious with the veiled 
story of a passion he dared not avow, her own eyes fell ; 
something in his look startled, troubled, hurt her. 

“ Prince loris,” she said, coldly, “ it is half-past seven 
o’clock. They will be waiting for you at the Casa Challoner. 
You forget your duties.” 

loris recovered himself and controlled his gaze. 

“ I do not return there to-night. I shall go home and 
dine alone.” 

But he did not move to go ; silence fell between them ; he 
leaned against the old yellow marble by the hearth ; the lids 
drooped over his tell-tale eyes. 

A servant entered with the lamps. Her heart beat quickly ; 
she feared she had been harsh to him. 

The light seemed to' fall on them as from a world they had 
forgotten. 

“Will you dine here?” she said, a little hurriedly. “In 
half an hour I expect my old friend Voightel: he arrives 
from Paris. Yes ? Stay, then, and re-read ‘ Nelida’ while I 
go away and change my gown.” 


284 


FRIENDSHIP. 


He kissed her hands. Left alone, it was not “ N41ida” that 
he read, but the troubled story of his own heart. 

Meanwhile he hoped that the snow on the Alps might 
detain Baron Voightel. 


CHAPTER XXIII. 

The snow did not detain Baron Voightel : at ten minutes 
past eight o’clock he took his green spectacles, his gray beard, 
and his caustic wit into the rooms of Etoile, and seeing loris 
there, who looked very much at home and had one of her 
tea-roses in his coat, thought to himself, with a chuckle, “ A 
la bonne Jieure ! It always comes at last. What sort of man 
is he, I wonder, that can charm our Indifferentia ?” 

They had a very pleasant dinner that evening, and pleasant 
hours after it by the great wood fire, and Voightel could not 
have told that loris was wishing him deep in a snow-drift, for 
loris was at his gentlest, brightest, and most graceful, and 
when at midnight they both took leave, accompanied Voightel 
to his hotel, and, pressing both his hands, declared the grati- 
fication and honor that he felt in becoming acquainted with 
the mighty traveller. 

“ A charming person ; beautiful manners and a historic 
face,” thought Voightel : nevertheless he shook his head as he 
went up the stairs of his hotel. 

Voightel was bound for Brindisi, and had only some thirty- 
six hours to pass in Rome ; far away, in those wild untrodden 
lands which he loved, men, armed to the teeth, were waiting 
his leadership, and many a problem of unexplored tracks and 
unnavigated lakes was awaiting his efforts to master them. 
A great expedition, that the governments of three countries 
had combined to organize, had been put under his command, 
and he had no time to loiter and read a romance. 

Voightel was a scholar, a savant, an explorer and a dweller 
in deserts, but he was an observer of men, a citizen of the 
world ; he was old and tough, and shrewd and learned, and 
could be very fierce; his alternate studies of civilized and 
barbaric life had disposed him to rate simple courage as high 


FRIENDSHIP. 


285 


as a Lacedaemonian, and to be somewhat deaf and blind to 
the vast increase in excellences of all sorts which modern 
manners claim. 

On this subject he was whimsical, and, to some hearers, 
extremely irritating,— the more so as no one could deny that 
he had the amplest experiences of both extremes, which lent 
to his arguments that authoritative exactitude which exas- 
perates the most patient opponent. 

He was exasperating also in many other ways. He had an 
inconveniently long memory for all kinds of minutiae : no lie 
imposed on him, and no hypocrisies succeeded with him. 
AVliat was still more exasperating, he had a stout belief in 
innocence when he found it, and a profound contempt for the 
world’s general ideas as to vice and virtue. 

When Voightel went to bed that night he found a honeyed 
little note saying that, his impending arrival having been an- 
nounced in the journals, Mr. and Lady Joan Challoner be- 
sought him not to forget the sincerest and most devoted of his 
friends. Voightel, who was an ungrateful man, or at least 
everybody said so except those savage tribes whom he adored, 
twisted the note up and lit his good-night pipe with it. 
But in the morning, when Voightel had seen the king, a 
few ministers, and half a hundred archaeologists and men 
of science, he found time to look in at the Casa Challoner, 
and was met with the most rapturous and cordial welcome, 
and many heartrending regrets that he had only half an hour 
to bestow there. 

It was five o’clock, and it chanced to be a Wednesday, and 
Lady Joan was surrounded by ladies. Voightel was terrible 
to Mrs. Grundy, because he had horrible ideas as to polygamy, 
and was also said to have eaten his own cabin-boy in cutlets 
in the Caribbean Isles. 

But the Lady Joan, for once regardless of her Bona Dea, 
received him with an absolute adoration and ecstasy, insisted 
on his smoking, and pressed on him all the liqueurs ever made 
upon earth. Such a dear, dear old friend ! Could she ever 
forget his kindness in those delightful old days in darling 
Damascus ! 

Voightel took the petting, sipped the liqueurs, smoked in a 
circle of dowagers and damsels, and said, with the genuine 
good humor, “ We don’t forget anything about Damascus, do 


286 


FRIENDSHIP. 


we? What good trhs-sec you used to have, Joan, and how 
clever Horace Vere was in knocking the heads off the bot- 
tles! We used to shoot cats from the roofs, and crows 
too. You never missed aim in those days. Is your wrist 
steady now 1 Pleasant days they were ; too pleasant 1 Poor 
Jack Seville 1” , 

Lady Joan felt as if some one had poured ice-water down 
her back, and was very effusive and ardent in pressing the 
liqueurs upon him. 

“ Just the same woman,” thought Voightel, eying her ; 
“just the same, only older; of course she’s just the same; 
there are cats and crows here, and champagne ; and I suppose 
dear Robert has a counting-house to be put away in some- 
where.” 

At that moment loris entered. 

“ lo, come and let me present you to the very dearest friend 
I have in the world, — a second father 1” cried the Lady Joan. 

“ We met last night,” was on Yoightel’s lips, but he saw 
that loris bent gravely before him with the ceremonious grace 
of a perfect stranger. Voightel was old and shrewd : he could 
see a situation at a glance and guess a great deal in an instant. 
He seemed not to remember loris, and felt that loris was 
grateful to him. 

“Is he a great friend of yours?” Voightel said aside to 
Lady Joan. “Ah 1 as great a friend as Jack Seville? Poor 
Jack ! This man is handsomer ; but then you have come into 
the land of living pictures. Jack only painted ’em.” 

Lady Joan colored and winced. 

“ Mr. Challoner farms loris’s land,” she answered, hurriedly. 
“ The prince is very poor, you know, and Mr. Challoner is 
very fond of him.” 

“ Challoner was fond of poor Jack, and of Horace too,” 
said Voightel, with an innocent meditation. “ Good creature 
your husband always was. So you farm, do you? Does it 
pay here? Nice country, but not remunerative, is it?” 

“ We don’t do it for profit 1” said Lady Joan, almost sharply, 
she felt so sorely tried. 

“ What it is to live in a poetic country 1” said Voightel. 
“ But the force of association is everything ; when I ate that 
cabin-boy, whom I hear that admirable lady in a shabby purple 
gown over there talking about to her neighbor, he was just as 


FRIENDSHIP. 


287 


agreeable to me as tender veal. It was all the force of associa- 
tion : my hosts liked him as well as veal, — better, even ; so 
did I. No doubt in Pall-Mall I should hold fried cabin-boy 
in abhorrence. W e are all the puppets of custom : don’t you 
think so, madam ?” 

The lady in a shabby purple gown, who was Lady George 
Scrope-Stair, thus suddenly addressed, was too horrified to be 
able to answer him. (“ I have heard him confess the fact 
myself,” said Lady George forever afterwards.) 

“ Ah ! he was a pretty boy, madam, and we ate him with 
nutmeg and caper sauce,” said Voightel, and rose and took 
himself away, his hostess following him on to the stairs. 

loris, under pretext to her of offering him an umbrella, fol- 
lowed him into the street, where it was raining a little. 

“ I did not seem to recognize you just now, my dear baron,” 
he said, with his sweetest smile, “ because the Lady Joan had 
so often spoken of presenting me to you that I did not like to 
deprive her of the pleasure by telling her she had been fore- 
stalled. She honors you so greatly.” 

Voightel looked in his face through his green spectacles. 

“ I understand,” he said, dryly, and they parted with elabo- 
rate courtesy on the pavement before the Casa Challoner. 

Voightel felt that there was danger impending, and if his 
caravan had not been chartered, and his Arabs armed to the 
teeth, and his escort all waiting far away in the sand-plains 
already, he would have stayed in Rome to see the romance 
unwind itself, and to guide its threads if need be. 

“ A very handsome man, and charming, but weak, I fear,” 
thought Voightel. “ Not the man to have the courage of his 
opinions, I am afraid. I wish he did not act so prettily. I do 
not like pretty lies. Ugly ones are bad enough. A pretty 
lie is like a poison in a rose : you die in perfume, but you 
die.” 

Thereupon he betook himself to the house of Etoile. He 
had never in his life wished for any tie of the affections, but 
at that moment he wished that he had been her father, that 
he might have said, “ Beware !” 

As it was, he dined with her, and felt his way very pru- 
dently, being sure of nothing. 

“ I saw your guest of last night, to-day,” he said, carelessly, 
after dinner. 


288 


FRIENDSHIP. 


«Yes?” 

“ Handsome man, very. I saw him at Joan Challoner’s.” 

Etoile was silent. 

“ He’s her friend, isn’t he ?” 

“ They are great friends, — yes.” 

Yoightel, eying her sharply, chuckled. 

“ Ah ! In a catalogue of their old masters, our beloved 
Forty Prudes of the London R. A. the other day put down 
‘ Portrait of Lady Hamilton, noted for her /neiidshtp with 
Nelson.’ Friendship is such an elastic word. There never 
was an age when it stood for so many things in private, and 
was yet so absolutely non-existent in fact. Our dear Joan has 
had many such friends, though I don’t think one ever let her 
farm for him before. What are his estates like ?” 

“ They are large, but, I should think, not very profitable.” 

“ With Joan on them? Probably not.” 

“ Why did you go and see her, if you don’t like her ?” 

“ My dear, she loves me.” 

“ Then you are very thankless.” 

Yoightel laughed. 

She seems to have grown very proper, — admirably proper : 
ehe had got mufl&ns and tea. In Damascus days it was cham- 
pagne and caviare. I reminded her of Damascus days. Ret- 
rospection is always so delightful. I think she did not wish 
the prince she farms for to see too much of me. I wonder 
she lets you give him tea-roses. Oh, a thousand pardons ; I 
meant nothing ! Only I fancy my Lady Joan does not love 
you, and she is nasty when she is crossed. ^G’est un joiieur 
contre qui, lie rien perdre dest heaucoup gagner' What was 
said of Tilly is as true of her,’ Oh, you need not look so 
tranquilly scornful, and indeed I suppose you will leave Rome 
very shortly, will you not? Embittered, is she? Yes, I dare 
say she may be. It is not nice to marry a Mr. Challoner, and 
sell teacups, and black Mrs. Grundy’s shoes, — not nice at all, 
when one was born to better things, — and it must naturally 
sour one. Why do I go and see her ? It’s the greatest service 
I can ever do her. It’s just the same with her as it is with 
poor Tartar. Tartar can’t say he’s traced the Lost Waters, 
and lived in the middle of Africa, with a pat of butter on his 
head for all his clothing, before me, when I left him funking 
at the coast, and have worn a pat of butter ten years myself. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


289 


But for that very reason I dine with Tartar in any city I meet 
him in, out of pure Christian charity. ‘Sharp old Voightel 
been dining with me,’ says Tartar ; and people believe then in 
his pat of butter. ‘ Dear old Voightel’s been dining with me,’ 
says Lady Joan ; and then people believe in hers. Besides, if 
one cut all the good-looking women that one knows something 
about, one would never go out to dinner at all. It’s just be- 
cause I do know that she’s so thankful to have a chance of 
being civil to me. And dining out is agreeable after the desert. 
Though I can live on pulse, I have a palate for oysters. Know 
all about her ? To be sure I know all about her. Knew her 
in short frocks, and used to give her sugar-plums : she spit 
at me when they weren’t big enough. Dear, dear! Archie’s 
daughter ought to have married a duke. How does she stand 
here ? She’s only scotched her early mistakes, not killed ’em. 
No woman ever can kill ’em. 11 i\!y a qiie les morts qui ne 
remennent pas, and ugly stories never die. There’s always 
somebody to keep them alive. Oh, of course, she knows that 
I know every one of her little slips,” he said, in conclusion, 
with that chuckle of grim satisfaction. “ She is always de- 
lighted to see me fill my pipe, and brings me the best Char- 
treuse, and don’t lie more than once in ten minutes about her 
doings in the East and dear old Palmerston. She is talking 
Platonics and selling pictures now, they tell me, and gets 
people to believe in both ? Dear me 1 well, the credulity of 
human nature always was an unknown quantity. She’s an 
artful dodger, our dear Joan ; but there — there ! one should 
never say anything.” 

With which he stretched his legs and sipped his claret 
comfortably. 

“ Platonics and pictures,” he echoed, with a chuckle. “ A 
charming combination ; very popular, I dare say. Bless my 
soul I I saw loris to-day again, as I told you ; he did not seem 
to me to go well with the tea and the tea-cakes. He would 
have suited our moonlit roofs in Damascus much better. Ah 1 
he’ll never get away from her, you know. I can see his fate 
in his face. Jack Seville never would have got away if he 
hadn’t died. The only man to have a chance with her would 
be a thoroughgoing bully, — a bigger bully than she is. The 
only law she knows is ‘ Paustrecht.’ But this man’s a gentle- 
man, and weak. There’s no hope for him. He won’t use the 


290 


FRIENDSHIP. 


fist to her, actually or allegorically. Isn’t that a sketch of him 
over there?” 

“ Yes.” 

Etoile was angered to feel herself color. 

Voightel walked over to the easel and stood there silently, 
then walked back again. 

“Very like a Giorgione or a Titian ; very historic face ; you 
ought to paint him in a coat of mail. Lord ! if he knew 
all I could tell him 1” Voightel chuckled wickedly in his 
chair. 

“ But one should never say anything,” he repeated, cau- 
tiously, hoping that his companion would ask him every- 
thing. 

But Etoile made no sign ; she tried, indeed, to change the 
conversation. The loyalty of her temperament made her 
averse to hearing any evil of a woman who still was — at least 
in Society’s sense of the much-tried word — her friend. 

Voightel, however, who loved to hear his own tongue, as 
was natural in a man who spent years in silence amidst un- 
peopled deserts, and then came back to Europe to have his 
speech listened to as an oracle’s at princes’ dinners and in 
public lecture-rooms, — Voightel would not leave the subject, 
and cheerily puffed out with his smoke all he knew. 

Voightel, who declared it was always best to say nothing, 
said everything, in the usual contrast between theory and 
practice, — said everything, with that chuckle of grim satisfac- 
tion with which human nature surveys human frailty, — an echo 
of the laugh that Satan laughed behind the tree, and that 
Eve heard and never could forget, and so transmitted to her 
posterity, — the laugh which Gounod has caught in the serenade 
of the Dio dell Or. 

Voightel laughed, with that laugh, as he told his Damascene 
recollections. 

“ Why do you take her pipe and her Chartreuse and tell 
me those things of her? It is unfair and ungenerous,” said 
Etoile, with some disgust and some impatience. To sit still 
and hear an enemy unjustly dealt with seemed to her an un- 
generous meanness.' Etoile had the old-fashioned idea that 
one should be even more scrupulous with a foe than with a 
friend. The whole theme, too, annoyed her, and made her 
ill at ease and dissatisfied with herself. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


291 


Yoightel rose to leave for his night-train for Brindisi; but 
his eyes were gloomy and troubled through his green spec- 
tacles. 

“ What are you so chivalrous for ? The woman is your 
foe, or will be. My dear, the days of Fontenoy are gone out ; 
everybody nowadays only tries to get the first fire, by hook or 
by crook. Ours is an age of cowardice and cuirassed cannon ; 
chivalry is out of place in it.” 

“ There can be no reason why she should be ever anything 
except my friend,” said Etoile, with a certain defiance ; but 
she felt that her voice was weak, and her color changed as 
Yoightel looked at the sketch on the easel. 

“Of course, no reason in life,” he said, dryly. “Only 
Archie and I were fools to send you to her. AVell, she is an 
agreeable woman when she likes. Treat her as such ; but 
keep her at arm’s length. If you can buy a thousand francs’ 
worth of lace of her, that will do to trim your maid’s night- 
caps, do. It will not be dear at the price. You will not be 
able to sell it again for more than a thousand pence, but it 
will be cheap at the price. A bowl of milk to a cobra is the 
better part of valor. It enables you to retreat unmolested. 
Mejiez-voxis toxtjours. But indeed I suppose you and she can 
never have any quarrel, you are so fai* apart ; you are in the 
clouds, and she is busy among the steam mills. Mefiez-vons : 
that is all. And remember that she is a handsome woman, 
and a charming creature, and a dear soul ; and, above all, she 
is Archie’s daughter. Ah ! that goes so far with so many of 
us ! She is Archie’s daughter ; but all the same the less seen 
of her the better. Still, buy the lace, — oh, yes, buy the lace ; 
and, if you can bring your mind to details, let it be some cotton 
rubbish off a village priest’s surplice, and let her think you 
think it Doge’s point of fifteen hundred. My dear, there is 
no money better laid out than what is spent in bowls of 
milk. You don’t see it? no, you will never charm snakes, 
then : you will only get stung by them.” 

And Yoightel rose to go on his way to the lands of the 
sun ; but before leaving the room he turned back and held out 
his hand once more to Etoile with trouble in his keen old 
eyes. 

“ Mejiez-vous ! — remember that ; remember that. But I 
wish I and Archie had not told you to come to her. And I 


292 


FRIENDSHIP. 


wish you were safe out of Rome. If you loill stay, buy lace 
enough, and let her think you could get the French Govern- 
ment to purchase an early master for the Louvre. Oh, my 
dear, if you are so obstinate that you will not leave the swamp, 
and so foolhardy that you will not set a bowl of milk, bitten 
you must be. It is written.” 

When he left her, the tears stood in his old resolute eyes, 
that would have looked unwinking down the iron tubes of a 
line of muskets levelled against him. 

He felt a vague fear of her future. 

She, who had been her own destiny, and never believed in 
any force of fate or doom of destiny other than lies in the 
nature we are born with, felt also a dim, shapeless apprehen- 
sion. She sat long, thinking, beside her dying fire. 

There are times when, even on the bravest temper, the 
ironical mockery, the cruel despotism of trifling circumstances, 
that have made themselves the masters of our lives, the hewers 
of our fate, must weigh with a sense of involuntary bondage, 
against which to strive is useless. 

The weird sisters were forms of awe and magnitude propor- 
tionate to the woes they dealt out, to the destiny they wove. 
But the very littleness of the daily chances that actually shape 
fate is, in its discordance and its mockery, more truly terrible and 
more hideously solemn ; it is the little child’s laugh at a frisk- 
ing kitten which brings down the avalanche and lays waste 
the mountain-side, or it is the cackle of the startled geese that 
saves the Capitol. 

To be the prey of Atropos was something at least; and 
the grim Deus vult perdere, uttered in the delirium of pain, at 
the least made the maddened soul feel of some slender account 
in the sight of the gods and in the will of heaven. But we, 
who are the children of mere accident and the sport of idlest 
opportunity, have no such consolation. 

All that Voightel had told her of this woman, whose friend- 
ship, as the world calls friendship, she had accepted, weighed 
on her with oppression and disgust. 

“ What is it to me ?” she thought, and in vain told her- 
self so. 

It was much to her, because loris had grown to be much. 
She scarcely knew it, but the pity she felt for him, the sym- 
pathy that he had appealed for, drew her heart towards liim 


FRIENDSHIP. 


293 


as it had never been drawn to any mortal creature. The pas- 
sion of other men had annoyed, revolted, or wearied her, but 
his, speaking only as yet in his eyes and his voice, approach- 
ing her with soft hesitation, with a tender and almost timid 
grace, stole on her unawares and did not alarm her. 

loris, swift to read all women, and incredulous of good faith 
in them, was perplexed, and yet impressed by the possibilities 
of passion, and the absolute absence of it, which he detected 
in her. Something of the exultation and the pride of an un- 
paralleled conquest could, he felt, be the boast of the man who 
should become her lover. 

“ He was the first that ever burst into that silent sea." 

It would be like that Norse king’s triumphant joy when 
the sharp prow cut through untraversed waters and his sight 
ranged over untrodden shores. 

He had first made her grow used to him and to his presence 
near her. 

With the noonday chimes of the churches and convents of 
Rome she had been almost sure from the first days of their ac- 
quaintance to hear the door unclose and his voice ask, “ Peuton 
entrer f' with the soft gladness in it of one who is sure that 
he is welcome. 

Those sunny winter mornings ; the dreamy smell of the 
burning pines ; the blue sky beyond the window-panes ; the 
clusters of hot-house bloom full of soft color ; the vague sense 
of exhilaration and of languor which the Roman air carries in 
it, — she rose to them all every day with the sweetest sense of 
happiness that had ever touched her life. They were all blent 
together confusedly and fragrantly, like her flowers in their 
baskets of moss. The days were soft and radiant, and she 
awoke to each with a new joy in her heart, that she thought 
was born of the new air and the new light, and of the imme- 
morial earth around. 

The first awakening of the artist in Italy is like the sudden 
blowing of a fiower. All previous life seems but as a trance, 
sad-colored and heavy with monotony. All that were hueless 
dreams before, take form and color, and the vaguest ideals all 
at once grow real. The hunger of the desire of the mind 
ceases, and a dreamy, ethereal content steals like music on u 


294 


FRIENDSHIP. 


south wind over the intelligence, which ceases to question and 
accepts and enjoys. 

Man never seems so great, nor God so near, nor mortal life 
so infinite, as here. 

The very immensity of the past serves to heighten the 
charm of the present. The very flower of human achieve- 
ment has blossomed here from the tree of life. Beside the 
Sun God unscathed through two thousand years Art ceases to 
seem vain. Beside the eternal well-spring of Egeria’s foun- 
tain passion may cheat itself into faith that is immortal. 

Art is strewn broadcast in the common ways, as the red 
tulips and the purple-capped anemones strew the common pas- 
tures ; and passion is in the air, in the light, in the wind ; it 
is in every burden of song down the still dark ways of the 
city, and in every shadow that falls on the lustrous white sheen 
of the fruit-scented fields. In other lands love may be an acci- 
dent of life ; in Italy it is life itself. 

The breath of passing love-fancies which dulls the mirror of 
most women’s souls had never passed over her. She had 
lived, so far as all love went, as untouched as any mountain- 
flower that blows where no steps of men have ever wandered. 
Her heart was like a deep, unruffled lake. 

Passion must be remembered to be known, as the sun must 
be seen. 

Men had wooed her with passion, sparing no pains. But 
a thousand lovers whom she rejects will teach a woman no- 
thing. If they cannot waken her soul or her senses she will 
escape from them as ignorant and as emotionless as though 
she had dwelt all her days in a desert isle. One day there 
will come a touch which will tell her all ; but till that comes 
she remains ignorant, because unmoved. The woman who 
has a hundred lovers, but who has not loved, is like a child 
that is blind. They tell her the sun is there, and she thinks 
she knows what manner of glory the sun’s is. But, in truth, 
she knows nothing. She sits in the dark, and plays with vain 
imaginings, like the sightless child. She may pity the pain 
of a wasted passion, that is all. The pity which is not born 
from experience is always cold. It cannot help being so. It 
does not understand. 

“ You know nothing of love,” Voightel had said to her one 
day, years before, in Paris. “It is very strange, you, whom 


FRIENDSHIP. 


295 


all the world believes to have had such a jeunesse orageuse^ 
and whom so many men are willing to adore, you know no 
more of it than that white gardenia flower in your girdle.” 

“ Except in theory,” she answered him. “ I have read so 

much of it. It is the theme of the world ” 

Read!” echoed the old wise man, with scorn. “Oh, 
child, what use is that ? Read ! The inland dweller reads 
of the sea, and thinks he knows it, and believes it to be as a 
magnified duck-pond, and no more. Can he tell anything of 
the light and the shade, of the wave and the foam, of the 
green that is near, of the blue that is far, of the opaline 
changes, now pure as a dove’s throat, now warm as a flame, 
of the great purple depths and the fierce blinding storm, and 
the delight and the fear, and the hurricane rising like a horse 
snorting for war, and all that is known to the man who goes 
down to the great deep in ships ? Passion and the sea are 
like each other. Words shall not tell them, nor color portray 
them. The kiss that burns, and the salt spray that stings, — 
let the poet excel and the painter endeavor, yet the best they 
can do shall say nothing to the woman without a lover and to 
the landsman who knows not the sea. If you would live, — 
love. You will live in an hour a lifetime ; and you will won- 
der how you bore your life before. But as an artist all will 
be over with you : that I think.” 


CHAPTER XXIY. 

As Etoile sat by her fire, and the train bore Yoightel south- 
ward and eastward through the snow, loris ascended the stairs 
of his prison-house. 

It was ten o’clock : there was a ball for which his escort was 
commanded ; he was dressed for the evening, some orders hung 
at his button-hole. His own sentiments were disregarded as 
to his orders. 

“ Decorations are out of place at private houses,” he had 
constantly urged : “ they should only be worn at courts and 
embassies. I assure you, ma chlre^ that anywhere else they 
are vulgar.” 


296 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Put them on when you go with me,” said the Lady Joan, 
sharply. She knew her own spheres and orbits better than he 
did ; the bankers and consuls’ wives, the small gentilities, and 
the free-born republicans, and all Shoddy in general, are very 
much impressed by any decorations. 

The Lady Joan was alone when he entered, and was lying 
on her sofa. Mr. Challoner was sleeping the sleep of the just 
in an after-dinner doze in his own little room. 

“ How late you are, lo !” she cried, and lifted herself, and 
threw her arm about his throat. 

He yielded, and felt ashamed. 

His heart smote him for a sort of unfaithfulness. But it 
was not to her that he felt faithless. 

“ Why didn’t you come to dinner ?” she asked him, caress- 
ing his silky dark hair. “ Robert was as cross as a bear. You 
get very uncertain now. What do you do with yourself?” 

“ I have to be much oftener at the court, and I spend so 
much time in that weary Messina Bureau,” said loris, and he 
sank down on a low stool and leaned his forehead on her knee. 
He felt weary, out of tune, impatient of himself and her. He 
felt a coward, and untrue. 

Nevertheless, she was alone; the lamps burned low; the 
instincts of long habit were strong with him. 

This passion had become a habit, and when passion and 
habit long lie in company it is only slowly and with incredu- 
lity that habit awakes to find its companion fled, itself alone. 

The clock ticked on, the hours went by ; she was happy, 
and he did not care to realize that he was false. 

Midnight came. She left him to go to her room and change 
her attire, and came back radiant with black-and-gold woven 
Eastern stuffs and a train of amber silk, and bade him clasp 
her bracelets, and see if the diamond spilla were set right in 
her braids. 

“ It’s one o’clock. Let’s be off, dear !” she said, as she 
thrust her hand into a glove ; and he brought her satin cloak, 
and wrapped her up in it. 

They went together through the quiet house and down the 
dusky stairs. Mr. Challoner was still sleeping the sleep of 
the just, but by this time he was not in his den, but on his 
bed. 

The jar of the closing house-door woke him : he turned 


FRIENDSHIP. 297 

comfortably, and thought how glad he was he had not to go 
out in the snow to a ball. 

Their cab joined the long string of slowly-creeping carriages, 
and in due time they were set down, and went together into 
the palace, with its modern upholstery all ablaze with wax- 
lights, and very much like a transformation-scene in a panto- 
mime, with its pink-tinted lamps and its paradise of palms. 

The great ball was being given at the Anglo-American 
bankers’, the Macscrips, who were very rich people, and al- 
ways spent ten thousand francs on the flowers, and said that 
they did so. 

It was not the highest society that went to the Macscrips’, 
but it was a kind of society that Lady Joan enjoyed very 
much better than the highest, — a society that was reverential 
to her because she was a Perth-Douglas, that believed all she 
said about dear old Palmerston or anybody else, and did not 
call in question her knowledge of the Arts, — a society in 
which she could waltz all night, and talk about “ lo,” and feel 
that she was Somebody, as she never could feel with Princess 
Vera’s contemptuous gaze on her, or under the inquisition of 
Lady Cardiff’s eye-glasses. 

She went up the crowded stairs and into the reception- 
room with loris behind her, and Mrs. Macscrip, who was a 
very censorious and particular little person, received her with 
delight. 

“ So kind of you ! But where’s dear Mr. Challoner ? Is 
he not coming ?” 

“ He’s not very well to-night, but I’ve brought lo,” said the 
Lady Joan, nodding to a dozen acquaintances. 

“ Delighted — too kind of you — charmie de vous t*oiV, 
Prince r said Mrs. Macscrip, amidst a tide of incoming 
people that surged about her like sea-waves. 

“ Ton jour 8 votre sermteur I” murmured loris, with his per- 
fect bow, that had been admired at FrohsdoriBf, at Vienna, and 
at the court of Petersburg ; and then followed the Lady Joan’s 
black-and-amber fan-shaped skirts, which were as a beacon 
from whose rays he must not stray. 

She plunged into the delights of the evening, and he bore 
the weariness of it as well as he could. 

He never danced. She danced all night. It was very 
tiresome to him to wait through the crush and heat of the 

N* 


298 


FRIENDSHIP. 


thronged rooms, with the noise of the band, or the tongues 
of the chatterers, always dinning in his ear. He had been 
to so many of these things ; alone, he would not have been 
amused amidst this mixed and second-rate society, but alone, 
he could at least have gone after leaning in a doorway twenty 
minutes. With her no such escape was possible. 

To hold her fan, to offer his arm, to bow five hundred times, 
to murmur, “ Comme vous etes belle to women he thought 
hideous, to say, ^‘‘EnchanU de vous trouver /” to bores he met 
every day, to be always at hand if she wanted to go and get 
an ice, or to see the lamp-lit garden, or to cross the room to a 
friend’s sofa, — these were his alternate diversions for six mortal 
hours. It was a tedious martyrdom. He envied Mr. Chal- 
loner at home and asleep. 

The sun was up when at last it pleased her to get into her 
cab and bid him light her a cigarette. 

“ You’ve been as dull as ditch-water all night, lo,” she said, 
as she took it ; “ and how pale you are ! Now look at me. I’m 
as fresh as paint.” 

He went home once more to his own house by the break of 
day, and threw himself on his bed, to court in vain the heavy 
slumber of morning. He was unhappy, and his conscience 
was ill at ease, and he could not lull it to rest with sophisms. 

Avoir mentis dst avoir souffert. Nf'etre jamais soi, faire 
illusion toiijoui's, dest une fatigue. Eire caressant^ se retenir^ 
se reprimer.^ toujours etre sur le qui-vive, se guctter sans cesse^ 
cliatouiller le poignard., sucrer le poison., veiller sur la rondeur 
de son geste et la musique de sa voix, ne pas avoir un regard — 
rien n^est plus dijjicile, rienvi est plus douhureux.'^ 

So wrote a great master ; and so suffered loris. 

In the early days of an illicit passion concealment is charm- 
ing ; every secret stairway of intrigue has a sweet surprise at 
its close ; to be in conspiracy with one alone against all the 
rest of humanity is the most seductive of seductions. Love 
lives best in this soft twilight, where it only hears its own 
heart and one other’s beat in the solitude. 

But when the reverse of the medal is turned, — when every 
step on the stairs has been traversed and tired of, when, in- 
stead of the heart’s beat, there is but an upbraiding voice, 
when it is no longer with one, but from one, that concealment 
is needed, — then the illicit passion is its own Nemesis, then 


FRIENDSHIP. 


299 


nothing were ever drearier, wearier, more anxious, or more 
fatiguing than its devious paths become, and they seem to hold 
the sated wanderer in a labyrinth of which he knows, and 
knowing hates, every wind and curve and coil, yet out of 
which it seems to him he will never make his way back again 
into the light of wholesome day. 


CHAPTER XXV. 

That same night that the Lady Joan drew her black-and- 
amber skirts through the ball-room crowds, and drew her lover 
behind them, to the admiration and approbation of all who 
beheld her, a sledge, furiously driven, was crossing one of the 
vast level tracts of Russia in the teeth of a storm of snow and 
wind. 

For hour after hour there was no break in the wide white 
track save when, at some wretched group of hovels or some 
small walled hamlet, the steaming and half-frantic horses were 
changed. The frozen plains stretched all around, dotted here 
and there by the black stems of stunted pines. The snow fell 
ceaselessly. Now and then through the roar of the wind there 
came as the wind lulled for a moment the sound of a wolf- 
pack baying afar off. The sledge went on, the horses tore 
their way through drift and hurricane. 

Every now and then a voice from within cried into the bit- 
ter air, “ Faster I faster 1 for the love of heaven 1” The voice 
was feeble and feverish. 

“ We had better stop, Fedorivanovitch,” urged a stronger 
voice, tenderly ; but the other always answered, “ No, no 1 on ! 
onr 

And the voice was obeyed, for it had the sound of death in 
it. 

The road was lost sight of ; all tracks were obliterated ; even . 
the burning oil in the lamps was frozen ; the snow fell always. 
The horses were urged onwards in the dark, for the night was 
black, though the world was white. Verst upon verst was 
covered of that horrible, silent highway. The baying of 
wolves was heard nearer. The wind whirled the falling snow 


300 


FRIENDSHIP. 


round and round in endless gyrations. It was a night when 
men die like frozen sheep. 

Still the feeble voice within cried always, “ No, no I on I 
on !” and it was obeyed. The glimmer of dull lights at 
length grew near, and showed where one more posting- station 
was. 

“ It is time,” muttered the driver, for he knew that in 
another half-hour his good beasts would fall to rise no more. 
He flogged them onward towards that faint light ; the snow 
ceased for a little while to fall ; the bay of the pack behind 
them grew distant once more. 

“ The Father be praised !” said the driver, as he pulled his 
horses up half dead before the cluster of miserable dwellings. 

It was in the middle of the night, but there were people 
awake. The postmaster came out with a lantern into the 
cold, which was enough to freeze every living thing. Through 
the open door, from which the snow was cleared, the light of 
a lamp streamed. A servant got down from the sleigh. 

“ Hold the light here,” he said, with an ashen face. 

“ Is he worse ?” said the driver, leaving his quivering beasts 
for a moment. The man snatched the lantern and held it so 
that he could see into the interior of the tarantass. 

“ Hear God !” he cried, with a great shout. 

Then, trembling with another tremor than that of cold, he 
tore away the furs and wraps. The post-people saw the form 
of a young man. The head was sunk upon the breast ; from 
the breast blood had oozed out over the costly furs and frozen 
there. 

“ He has but swooned ; he has but swooned,” the people 
cried. The driver added, “ Only half an hour ago he was 
crying to me to go faster.” 

“ The night is death !” cried the servant, beside himself. 
“ It is Fedorivanovitch Souroff. Help me carry him within 
— quick ! quick ! quick !” 

A dozen stout arms aided him to lift his master from the 
. sleigh. He was quite a young man, of singular beauty, and 
he wore the uniform of the Cuirassiers of the Guard ; his 
face was without color, his lips scarcely breathed ; blood still 
oozed from his chest and froze as the outer air reached it. 

“ His wound has broken out afresh 1” cried the servant, and 
wept as children weep. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


301 


They carried his master within the posting-house and laid 
him down on the skins and rugs of his sledge on the floor by 
the warmth of the stove. 

It was a poor, miserable place ; but the people were kind 
from pity and sorrow, not merely from respect for the sword 
and for a great noble’s name. Women were crying ; they 
brewed hot tea quickly; they prayed to their saints; they 
did what they knew. 

“ But on such a night to be out,” they cried, “ with a 
wound 1 it is death.” 

“ It is death,” said his servant. “ But he was in such haste 
to reach Petersburg he would have no delay. What can we 
do ? — what can we do ? Is there a surgeon ?” 

There was none nearer than at a town they named lying 
versts away. 

The officer meanwhile was dying. He had never moved 
since they had laid him there upon the black bearskins from 
his sleigh ; his head had fallen back, his eyes were closed ; the 
drops of tea they tried to force through his teeth only wetted 
his lips ; they had torn his linen open and his shirt, but they 
could not stanch the blood. It flowed sluggishly, feebly, but 
it flowed always, and looked dark and clotted. It came from 
the lungs. 

He had been wounded, by a spear, six weeks before in the 
chest. 

The people stood round him appalled, silent, helpless ; the 
women sobbed; his servant kneeled beside him. Without, 
the snow fell, and the winds howled and the wolves. The 
dull, yellow rays of the lamp fell on the pallid and delicate 
beauty of his face. 

Suddenly his eyes opened wide, he stretched his arms out, 
he gazed with heart-sick yearning into the circle of strange 
faces that were about his death-bed. 

“Dorotea!” he cried, aloud, and his hands felt the empty 
ail- feebly, as for some beloved thing they sought to touch. 

“ Dorotea !” he cried once more. 

Then he fell back exhausted ; the blood gushed with a 
quicker current from his breast ; he sighed once, — wearily, — 
and then was dead. 

* * * * ;f! 5|« :|c 

“ That is the name of the woman he loved,” said the soldier 
2 ^ 


302 


FRIENDSHIP. 


that was both his servant and his foster-brother. “ I have a 
written packet to take to her, his cross for his mother, his 
sword for the Tzar. It is a singing woman that he loved. 
Perhaps she is singing now, and he lies dead.” 

* ♦ 5fe St: * 

She was singing, — in the “ Romeo and Giulietta” of Gou- 
nod, in the Opera House of St. Petersburg. It was a great 
night, by imperial command. The court was present in all its 
brilliancy, and not even the presence of the Tzar could restrain 
the delirium of the overflowing house. Never before, so they 
vowed, had the beauty of Dorotea Coronis been so great or 
her marvellous voice so divine. In her white robes, in the 
balcony-scene, with the diamonds in her hair and on her 
breast, her supreme loveliness vanquished even the magic of 
her voice. She was so beautiful that for some moments the 
volleys of applause welcomed only her beauty and would not 
let her voice be heard. They adored the scene and forgot the 
singer. She was the rival of herself. 

Then, when at last silence came and let her voice be heard, 
that seemed like a lark’s to lose itself in the very heights of 
heaven, the hushed and breathless crowds forgot her beauty 
and believed that they listened to the angels. 

She had had many a night of triumph, many a night when 
great theatres had rung with the thunders of a people’s hom- 
age, and a multitude beside itself with rapture had thrust her 
horses from the shafts and drawn her to her home. But no 
night had perhaps ever equalled this one. 

When the opera was ended, imperial gifts were brought to 
her in the choicest shapes that jewels could be found to take, 
and crowns and wreaths and clusters of flowers, all holding 
some gem of price, covered her dressing-chamber with their 
costly lumber. 

When she left the Opera House the whole city seemed in 
commotion. It was a white city, for it was still midwinter ; 
but a million lights sparkled everywhere above the snow. A 
brilliant guard was escorting the imperial carriages ; there was 
a guard also for herself, — a volunteer guard of many of the 
highest gentlemen of the land, bearing torches and shouting 
vivats in her honor. They ran with her to her house, a bril- 
liant medley of fantastic figures, wrapped in furs and waving 
torches. The thunder of their plaudits rang up to the clear 


FRIENDSHIP. 


303 


steel-hued sky of the North, where the stars were shining 
so intense in their brilliancy that they seemed to pierce the 
frozen air with spears of light. Across one-half the heavens 
also there was outspread in ail its wonder the rose-red rays 
and golden flames of the aurora borealis. 

“ Oh, the night of nights I” cried in ecstasy the old Span- 
ish woman who had never left her since she first had sung in 
Seville. 

Dorotea Coronis did not answer : she sat before her mirror, 
with her hands listlessly clasped, weary and silent. What was 
triumph to her ? A story stale and without power to charm. 
Of what use were all the voices of earth adoring her ? She 
only longed to hear one that was never now upon her ear. 

“ Oh, my love, my love ! oh, my soul !” she had said in her 
heart all the while that the flood of song had poured from her 
lips, and she had seen nothing of the great throngs that lis- 
tened to her, nothing of the deluge of light and the sea of 
faces : she had only seen in memory the eyes of Fedor. 

A great supper waited for her, where princes were the hosts, 
in a very bower of camellias and roses that gold had made 
bloom whilst the Neva was ice and the whole land was snow ; 
but she sent word that she was unwell, and sat alone in her 
chamber, disrobed, with her loose hair hanging over her, 
whilst the aurora burned in the midnight skies, and the old 
Spaniard, crouching on the threshold, told her beads. 

There was a little open casket before her ; there were letters 
in it, — nothing but letters, and one lock of a man’s fine fair 
hair. 

She read all the letters, one by one from first to last, as she 
had read them a thousand times. The first were a mere few 
formal lines of such courtesy as strangers pay ; the others, 
eloquent utterances of an absorbing passion, now alive with 
hope, now desolate with despair; the last, words that made 
light of a spear-wound received in a mountain-skirmish, and 
that burned with a love that made all physical pain indiflferent, 
nay, unfelt. 

“ You call me cold,” she thought as she read. “ Oh, my 
love ! oh, my soul ! you do not know. What were the world’s 
scorn, the world’s shame, to me, — the vile world that harbors 
the prostitute and the pander in its high places, and hugs 
a lie and all that speak one ? The world that stones inno- 


304 


FRIENDSHIP. 


cence like a poor dog called mad, and kisses the clay foot of 
any gilded sin ! What were the world to me ? Think you I 
would not welcome the worst that it could do to me to buy 
one hour with you ? But, my love, my soul, I want to save 
you from myself. Oh, God 1 give me strength to be strong, 
to ‘ be cold,’ to bear your reproach, to bear your pain I 
Mother of Christ, give me stren^h to keep you free : it is for 
you, — for you, — for you 1” 

Then she warmed the letters in her breast as if they were 
the pale cheeks of some little ailing child, and clasped them to 
her, and rocked herself to and fro wearily, as one whose bur- 
den was greater than her force. 

The door of her chamber unclosed without the sound 
reaching her ear : with a noiseless step her husband entered 
and approached her, seeing in the mirror before her the letters 
clasped to her bosom, the white grief of her bowed face, 
the great tears that stole one by one from under her closed 
eyelids. 

He stretched his hand over her shoulder and, with a clutch 
as chill and hard as though his hand was in a glove of steel, 
he grasped the letters that lay in her bare breast. 

Then the Due de Santorin smiled. 

“We have wanted these a long time, my lawyers and I,” 
he said, slowly. “You will have no more like them, madame. 
Your lover is dead I” 


CHAPTER XXVI. 

lORls awoke very weary in the morning. 

He had slept but little, and that feverishly. 

The shrill shrieks and yells and whooping cries of the 
maskers scare sleep from all eyes on the last nights of Car- 
nival in Rome. 

With sunrise the maskers had gone to their homes, worn 
out with noisy riot and rapture; the sun came tenderly in 
through the orange boughs by his casement; some robins 
were singing on the window-sill ; but he awoke feverish and 
depressed, and turned from the waking smile of the day. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


305 


N’es-tu pas mien ? 

Ah ! Je vois que tu m’aimes bien, 

Tu rougis quand je te regarde/’ 

he murmured, as he closed his eyes against the light, as the 
old words of the poet, dead nearly three centuries ago, drifted 
through his misty thoughts. It was not the woman whose 
skirts he had followed through the close- crowds of the ball- 
room that recalled these tender old words to his memory as he 
awoke. 

Then he remembered with a shudder that it was Fat Tues- 
day, — last day of Carnival, last night of masquerade. 

His friend loved the roar and the riot of Carnival ; she 
was at the height of her happiness, throned in a break, dis- 
.guised, and with wire visor, flinging the showers of chalk over 
the crowd, and sustaining the duel of the sweetmeats with the 
balconies. There was a robust vi^r of insatiable enjoyment 
in her throughout the mad pranks of those headlong frolics, 
which once had attracted, which now disgusted him. She 
herself paid little heed whether he were disgusted or attracted : 
he was hers, as much as the live bird tied to her bouquet. 

She donned her wire mask and her costume, Turkish, 
Chinese, Moyen-flge, or what not, and amused herself with 
that zest in the masquerade which made her as boisterous and 
gleeful as any lad of fifteen summers. The noisy, dusty, riotous, 
shrieking pandemonium was paradise to her, and woe betide 
him if he had not his carriage ready at her door, with its steeds 
pranked out in fooling guise and its cushions laden with con- 
fetti and flowers. 

He rose to this weary duty with a sigh. In days of boy- 
hood he had loved well enough the merriment and graceful 
mummeries of Carnival, which then had been full of a color 
and a light which have now passed forever away from the 
Carnival as from the world ; now, it seemed to him, both he 
and the world had grown grave and fatigued, and could never 
any more shake their joy-bells without effort. 

Lady Joan did not care what he felt or did not feel : she 
sent him word to mind and be ready at three o’clock. 

He bade his servant see that the break and the horses 
were ready, and then went out of the house to the house of 
Etoile. 

She was so used to see him there by noonday that she only 
26 ^ 


306 


FRIENDSHIP. 


looked up with a smile as he entered, and went on with a 
study she was painting. 

He looked at it quickly : it was his own portrait. 

“ Gro in the light, yonder,” she said to him, without answer- 
ing his glad rapid words of surprise. “ I made this study 
from memory : I want to finish it. I shall call it Hamlet.” 

“ Hamlet I And why ?” 

“ Because you are very like Hamlet : you will never be sure 
of what you wish ” 

“ I am only too sure of what I wish,” said loris, almost in- 
audibly, and his eyes dwelt on her with a sombre passion in 
them that, like a magnetism, drew up her own regard to his. 

She looked a moment, then shuddered a little, and grew 
pale. 

He kissed her left hand as it hung by her side, and kept it 
in his own. 

In the silence they could hear the beating of each other’s 
hearts. 

The servant threw open the door, and they started as if 
they were guilty. He left her side quickly, and went and 
stood by the hearth. An old German musician had entered, 
a little feeble old man, unknown to fame, but who had all the 
music of his country at his fingers’ ends and in his heart and 
soul. 

“ You bade me bring you the Passion Music of the sublime 
Bach,” he said, with the humble fond look at her as of a dog 
to the only creature kind to him. The old man knew, heard, 
saw nothing but his music. 

With a timid salutation to loris, whom he did not know, 
he shambled to the grand piano standing in the shadow, 
and ran his hands over it and began to play unbidden. The 
solemn, tender, mystic melodies filled the room with their 
power. 

She motioned to loris to stay where he was, and continued 
her painting. The light fell on his delicate features, thought- 
ful and mysterious, like the heads of Bronzino’s and the old 
Florentine painters’ portraits ; the odors of the jonquils and 
hyacinths were in the air, sweet and tranquil as peace ; the 
music stole softly from the distant shadows, where the musi- 
cian played on unseen, unwitting of the flight of time. 

loris was unhappy, yet content: unquiet, yet lulled to a 


FRIENDSHIP. 


307 


dreamy repose. Etoile was very pale, and her hand, as it 
moved, had lost its firm, unerring mastery, and trembled ever 
so little. Yet, when their eyes met across the sunlight and 
the heads of the flowers, they were both happy. 

They did not need words : the music was the fittest inter- 
preter of both their hearts. 

Two o’clock rang from the bells without. 

Both started to think that time had flown thus by them 
unnoted. They had scarcely spoken, yet the hour was perhaps 
the sweetest of both their lives and the purest of his. Never 
afterwards could one of them, at least, hear the music of 
those themes without the hot tears rushing to her eyes, and 
that short sweet serene hour returning to her like “ remem- 
bered kisses after death.” 

Two o’clock rang and struck from clock and bells, and 
Princess Vera sent a message begging that she would not 
forget to come to her balcony in an hour’s time. 

“ The Corso !” said Etoile, in impatience, and turned the 
wet panel with his portrait on it to the wall. 

The Corso ! 

loris remembered his tyrant. 

“ I too must go to the Corso,” he said, with a restless 
sigh. 

She did not ask with whom ; she did not even look at him. 
He took his leave whilst the old German still played on through 
the sad intricate melodics of Schumann and Chopin. 

He went out of her presence serener, happier, with the 
melodies about him like the very breath of religion, and the 
fragrance of the flowers seeming to follow him in symbol of 
u pure soul opened to his gaze and touch. 

He went, and drove the horses to the Casa Challoner ; and 
down the stairs came his mistress, masked, and with a spangled 
domino. Behind her were Guido Serravelle as a trovatore, 
with his guitar, and Douglas Graeme as a Louis Treize mous- 
quetaire, and all with tin shovels in their hands to bespatter 
the crowd with their chalk. 

“ You look as dull as a grave-digger, lo. Why didn’t you 
dress up in something?” said the Lady Joan, as she tossed 
him a mask on her doorstep. She gave a piercing Carnival 
yell, and jumped into the break ; young Guido strummed his 
guitar ; Mimo ran up puffing and breathless, fat and absurd, 


308 


FRIENDSHIP. 


clad as a Condottiere, and banging the step with his sword ; 
the Count di Sestri, stately and elegant, dressed as Cesare 
Borgia in azure and white, came also. 

“ En route 1” cried the Lady Joan, with rapture, and they 
rolled away, soon mixed with the jostling press of carriages 
and cars, maskers and mummers, under the white clouds of 
the flying chalk. 

loris, all the dreary hours through, looked up at the brilliant 
balcony of the Princess Vera, but he did not see Etoile there. 
He was glad. 

The Corso over, ending with its fairy war of the Moccoletti, 
till a sea of fire sparkled from the Porta del Popolo to the 
Bepriso dei Barbrie, they went to dinner in a private room at 
Spillmann’s, a very gay, noisy, and costly dinner, that lasted 
long, and thence, at midnight, the Lady Joan, slipping into a 
black domino instead of a spangled one, as a snake slips its 
skin, passed to the Veglione. 

He was not relieved from his attendance on her until four 
o’clock on the following morning, when, tired for once, and 
hoarse from screaming in falsetto through her mask, she con- 
sented to leave the crowded foyer and go home. 

loris did not go home. He walked about the quiet streets 
in the clear crisp air, as the gray in the sky showed the break- 
ing day, and went far out of his way to pass the old palace on 
the Montecavallo. 

“ She has been asleep all these hours,” he thought, and 
looked up at the dark grated casements which shut in the sleep 
of Etoile. 

How horrible it seemed to him that a woman could grin 
and scream and riot through the day and night, and give and 
take the veiled indecencies and salacious jests of that masked 
motley mob of the masquerade at the Apollo ! 

Some gardeners were entering the Colonna gardens. He 
entered with them, and dropped down on the bench where he 
had found Etoile sitting a few days before. 

Day was breaking over the vastness of Borne, outspread in 
its grayness and calm beneath. 

He looked at it till the tears rose in his eyes and dimmed 
his sight, as the light of dawn trembled over the city. 

“ Oh, the things that I dreamt in my youth !” he thought : 
and his heart was sick ; for he felt that his youth and his 


FRIENDSHIP. 


309 


dreams might all have resurrection, but at the gates of the 
grave where they were buried a dread shape stood, and barred 
the way ; and the spectre was the ghost of a dead passion. 


CHAPTER XXVII. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Challoner, who was a virtuous man and 
did not go to masked balls, and was a wise man and let no 
spectres rise to him, was having a cup of tea comfortably in 
bed ; after that he had a cold bath, the morning papers, an 
interview with his little girl and the governess, and then pro- 
ceeded at a leisurely pace through the streets, across the water, 
to a certain grim old mansion in the centre of the Trastevere, 
and towards one of the many doors that opened on its grimy 
wide staircase of stone, a door that had been made out of keep- 
ing with its surroundings by modern additions of plate-glass 
and brass plates, and bore on it, in conspicuous letters, “ Societa 
Italiana-Inglese del Poiite Calabrese-Siciliano,” and had under- 
neath this inscription : “ Bureau della Birezione.” 

When Mr. Challoner had mounted the grimy staircase and 
had passed the modernized door, he was generally very happy, 
even happier than when with his little girl and her governess. 

To begin with, he was a director, a thing which he always 
liked being. The word director had an important, responsible, 
pompous kind of sound that was balm to him ; he had been a 
singularly unlucky man, but the word director always blinded 
him to this fact : it has a successful sound about it ; in spite 
of the innumerable bubbles and awful earthquakes that it too 
often heralds, the word director always sounds like wealth and 
public esteem. But sweeter, even than for this, was his oflSce 
desk to Mr. Challoner, because it symbolized all his substitutes 
for that more vulgar vengeance which ignorant men wondered 
he had never taken on loris. 

loris was wearied and impatient of this speculation into 
which he had been beguiled. 

Things were going wrong ; all these dreary and complicated 
troubles into which he had been drawn were each day knitting 
themselves tighter and more intricately. 


310 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Mr. Challoner had a knack of making things go wrong quite 
unintentionally : on the banks of Orontes and Euphrates they 
had gone so wrong that hundreds and thousands and even mil- 
lions of pounds, and the whole name and fame of a very fine 
business, had tumbled into those historic rivers and been seen 
no more. 

“ A mauvais jeu honne mine," said Mr. Challoner, and the 
more unfortunate he was, the more imperturbably did he set 
his unchangeable countenance in a stern and blank repose, off 
which it was impossible for anybody to take any diagnosis of 
his feelings, and begin to play again, with shares for his cards 
and the round world for his roulette- wheels. It was in a very 
small way indeed, but it was as sweet to him as if he had been 
a Rothschild. His wife enjoyed selling a cracked teacup, and 
he enjoyed floating an obscure company. He had not succeeded 
in anything, and in all probability never would ; but that did 
not interfere with his enjoyment. 

If he had gone out in a wintry dawn and shot at loris, it 
would have been uncomfortable and unsatisfactory : even if he 
had seen loris lying dead on the turf it would not have pleased 
him particularly ; he was a slow-blooded and humane person ; 
but to see the money of loris dropped down into |3ottomless 
abysses of speculation, and the honor of loris imperilled in 
hastily- and ignorantly-assumed responsibilities, did please him 
a little in a sluggish sort of way, and made him smile when he 
was safely shut up alone, examining loris’s signatures, in the 
Bureau of the Messina Bridge. It was a vengeance much 
more appropriate to his era than the shot in the wintry dawn 
would have been. 

Mr. Challoner was essentially a man of his time. He could 
pocket all affronts, and conceal all resentments ; he could turn 
pompous placid phrases when his veins were turning cold in 
wrath ; he could enter a drawing-room behind his wife and 
loris and endure imperturbably the smile of the drawing-room 
crowd ; but he was human, nevertheless, and when he saw the 
fortunes of his wife’s friend dropping — dropping — dropping 
into the Sicilian sands and seas, he smiled. Mr. Challoner 
knew by experience that curses may come home again, but 
money never does. Mr. Challoner would sit at his desk in 
this large and ancient palace that held the Messina offices, 
and count up columns of figures, and feel content, — so con- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


311 


tent that when his wife would call for him in the twilight, as 
she did sometimes, he would say quite good-humoredly, — and 
he was not a good-humored man, — “ And loris : is loris with 
you, my love?” 

Yet in this the fourth season of its commercial existence 
the bridge at the Straits of Messina could not be said to be a 
success : indeed, it had stopped short at its very commence- 
ment. The piles were there in the sand for anybody who 
liked to look at them, but they could not be said to advance 
traffic, and they did not satisfy the shareholders. 

It costs a good deal of money to drive piles into sand, and 
a good many millions of francs were driven in with them, 
and the crabs ran in and out the piles, and the waves washed 
them, but there was no bridge to be seen in the soft ambient 
air spanning the waters. To be sure there was always the 
bridge upon paper, in the clearest and most colossal designs 
that could delight the soul of any engineer ; and the engineers 
said that the piles in the sand were all that could be reason- 
ably expected from the number of years and the number of 
millions. But everybody is not an engineer to understand 
this, and the shareholders were not satisfied : indeed, when 
ever are shareholders satisfied ? 

If you give them ten per cent, and a bonus, they are fright- 
ened: they think you are going too fast; if you give them 
nothing at all, and make them pay up, they are equally 
frightened, and rush and sell out and ruin you and them- 
selves. 

There are only the swine at Gadara that ever could equal 
shareholders in silliness, so the Lady Joan said; but she was 
not herself very angry when the shares of the Messina Bridge 
dropped from zenith to zero ; she was quite good-tempered 
about it; she was only a promoter, not a shareholder, and 
sensibly said that you cannot expect colossal works to be rattled 
off in a day. 

Into the sand and the sea, with the piles, however, had 
gone a good deal of money, not of hers. “ I’m too poor to 
put money in ; I can only give ’em my brains,” she always 
said, pleasantly, in all affairs of the kind. But loris had 
put his money in, allured by those fair white parchment 
designs with all the engineers’ lines and dots and figures ; and 
when he went down to the Gulf of Faro, and looked over the 


312 


FRIENDSHIP. 


blue serene sea where the bridge should have been, and was 
not, his heart sunk as lead would have sunk in the sea. And 
his heart smote him too, thinking of those shareholders whom 
in all innocence and good faith he had so unhappily helped to 
mislead ; and he could not laugh when the Lady J oan called 
them his Gadarene swine. 

Mr. Challoner did smile, as far as the rigidity of his counte- 
nance could ever be said to do so. 

He had been a shepherd of the sheep that were silly as 
swine, and had been well paid to be a shepherd, and could 
sit at his handsome desk in the old palace where the bureau 
was, serenely and without responsibility. 

It was only loris that was responsible. 

The bridge by the Gulf of Faro was one of those doomed 
enterprises which open like a blaze of fireworks on a king’s 
birthday, and in a little while leave but some charred sticks and 
some burnt fingers to the darkness of the night. Its fate was 
written, and its name was ruin. 

Even if ever it were to get built, no commerce could ever 
for centuries to come be enough to repay its gigantic cost. 
And it never would get built; the seas and the winds for- 
bade it. 

“ Who ever said it would be built ?” cried Lady Joan, in 
irritation at the simplicity of loris when he was surprised and 
pained at this. “Who ever said it would be built? We 
proposed to try and build it. That is quite another thing.'^’ 

When he did not see the difference, she told him he was a 
fool. To propose is lucrative ; to build is not so. 

loris, whose imagination had been taken captive with bril- 
liant fancies of reviving the old commerce between Africa and 
Italy, of opening up the old highways of the seas and bringing 
within easy reach the vast untouched riches of the great isles, 
was inconsolable, and full of bitter anxieties, as the months 
and the years slipped by and brought no nearer the realization 
of those splendid schemes that had glittered so brilliantly on 
paper and parchment. 

He saw no return for his money nor for that of all the tens 
of thousands of shareholders embarked in it. He saw con- 
tinual expenditure ; that was all. The public history of the 
bridge of Faro was like the private history of the land at 
Fiordelisa. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


313 


Meantime, to Mr Challoner, both the public and the private 
history were matters of grim and tranquil diversion. 

“ Wrath is a terrible impiety, quite an impiety,” said Mr. 
Challoner, furling his umbrella in the offices that afternoon 
when his day’s labors were done, for on his road thither that 
morning, meeting an acquaintance in the street, he had heard 
with regret that Baron Chemnitz and the Marquis Cardello 
had met in a fatal encounter on the dreary lands of a Flemish 
frontier town, and that Cardello was dead, and his adversary 
dying. Mr. Challoner, furling his umbrella, felt a compassion 
tinged with contempt for both the combatants. 

What good did dying do ? 

Mr. Challoner looked at loris’s signatures lying on his desk, 
and, having made his umbrella quite smooth, went out into 
the street again contentedly. 

“ So the baron has killed Cardello, and is shot through the 
lungs himself?” said another acquaintance that he met, and 
then stopped embarrassed, fearing Mr. Challoner might have 
some fellow-feeling ; but Mr. Challoner had none. 

He was very sorry for both, he said, very ; and more sorry 
still for Society. 

And he undid the beautifully-neat umbrella as a few drops 
fell from the clouds, and went onwards. All the world was 
talking of the tragedy that had closed the great Chemnitz 
scandal in the darkness of death. 

Mr. Challoner pursued his tranquil way home to the Tem- 
ple of all the Virtues, and, as the sounds of his wife’s guitar 
struck on his ear, put his umbrella in the rack, and looked at 
the sables of loris hanging on the coat-stand of the anteroom, 
then he shook his head and smiled grimly. He shook his 
head for Baron Chemnitz, he smiled for himself. 

On the other side of the Oriental silk curtains his wife and 
loris were speaking of the tragedy. 

“ Alas 1 that poor woman 1” said loris, absently, thinking 
of the lost and lonely creature for whose sake these men had 
perished. 

Lady Joan, who was tired after the masking of the day and 
night, struck a chord of her chitarra and laughed, as she lay 
full length on her sofa. 

“ How could she be such a fool !” 

Mr. Challoner entered the room and went up to the sofa, 
o 27 


314 


FRIENDSHIP. 


BtariDg hard through his eyeglasses, not seeing, or not willing 
to see, the heavy frown on his wife’s brows. 

“ There is bad news from the Straits, loris,” he said, 
without preface, and began to extract letters, papers, and 
telegraphic despatches from his pocket. 

The face of loris, pale and weary already, grew paler. 

Mr. Challoner thought of Baron Chemnitz lying dying with 
the air whistling through his pierced lungs, thought of him 
certainly with regret and pity, because he had been so great a 
headstone of the commercial world, but still with contempt, — 
the contempt of a superior person. 

“ Very bad news,” he said, with a sigh. “I fear we shall 
lose — well, I dare not say how much we shall lose. Bead 
these letters.” 

Now, “ we” was a figure of speech, — the vague, metaphor- 
ical, much-beloved pronoun hourly in use at the Casa Chal- 
loner and at Fiordelisa ; a mere figure of speech, because, 
though Mr. Challoner was a shepherd, the gold of loris had 
gathered together this fiock that was more silly than the 
Gadarene swine. 

loris stretched his hand for the letters : his dark cheek grew 
very white ; but the Lady Joan snatched them before he could 
touch them. 

“ Oh, bother ! What do you come pulling a long face for, 
Bobert? The letters will keep till to-morrow. Bad news 
always keeps and never evaporates, — worse luck ! Of course 
everything’s going wrong : you wouldn’t listen to wc, either 
of you.” 

And she read the letters disdainfully, tossing a page here 
and there to loris. She was not very anxious herself ; the 
concession had been got ages ago, and had been taken dis- 
creetly and advantageously to the English market, where 
everybody that knows anything takes his golden eggs at all 
times to be hatched ; nothing could undo the fact of the con- 
cession, or take away its profits. As for the sheep that were 
silly as the Gadarene swine, if they liked to run down the 
slope, let ’em. 

That was the Lady Joan’s opinion. 

The letters were indeed of very ominous import. Mr. 
Challoner had not exaggerated : he never did exaggerate : he 
was a very exact man. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


315 


All the letters were bad, and could scarcely have been worse : 
they told of riotous work-people clamoring for wages, of labor 
at a stand-still for want of funds, of ill-conducted tides that 
sucked under every bit of timber or stone deposited near them, 
of many millions that had produced nothing except some rot- 
ten piles, convenient resting-place for barnacles ; and, finally, 
very disagreeable hints that shareholders were dissatisfied, and 
clamored, and began to talk of a commission of inquiry. 

loris’s changeful face altered from its pallor to an angry and 
nervous flush, 

“ But it is abominable !” he said, rising in an indignant sur- 
prise and pain. “ Why should they write in that manner? 
They must surely know that I have done my best. Is not my 
own money gone in the sand and the sea with theirs ? I do 
not comprehend. Would they insult me?” 

“ Nobody talks of insult in business, lo,” said the Lady 
Joan, dryly. “ In business you pocket your fine feelings. 
Don’t look like that. What does it matter ? They are a set 
of idiots.” 

“ I do not understand,” said loris, unheeding, crushing in 
his hand one of the letters he had read. “ Can any man give 
better guarantee of his good faith than to risk all he has ? 
You said it was an enterprise that was good ; all these men 
said it was good. I have done my best ; I have imperilled 
myself ; I will pay those laborers that cry for their wages 
out of my own means single-handed ; if I am penniless to- 
morrow I will pay them all. Yes, to-day. But how is it 
my fault? Can I govern the waters? Can I say to the 
sea. Peace ? Could I tell that the sands would sink and the 
storms arise ? They have no patience, those people, and no 
pity.” 

He was strongly agitated ; his face had grown very white 
again, and the nerves of his brow were swollen. He paced up 
and down the room. He did not understand. 

Mr. Challoner leaned back in his chair, and trimmed his 
nails thoughtfully. He liked being a shepherd, and knew 
that he would probably have to cease being a shepherd if 
those silly flocks screamed so loudly ; yet he enjoyed the mo- 
ment. 

He felt more compassionate contempt than ever for Baron 
Chemnitz, who could think of nothing better than those un- 


316 


FRIENDSHIP. 


comfortable and discreditable pistol-shots in a field in Flan- 
ders. 

Lady Joan picked up the crumpled letter and smoothed it. 

“ Don’t look so awfully put out, lo,” she said, with a rough 
efibrt at consolation, “ It’ll all come right. And don’t, for 
heaven’s sake, talk of going paying the navvies and ship- 
wrights yourself. You always will come to grief in business, 
because you always will bring such fine sentiments into it with 
you. Remember the china pot that would go swimming down 
stream with the iron pots : that’s you to the life ” 

“ I shall pay them,” said loris, between his teeth. 

In all these bitter and angry letters nothing had stung him 
so much as the statement that the foreign workmen on tbe 
Gulf of Faro were clamoring against the direction for their 
unpaid wages. 

“ Oh, heavens ! what a fool you are !” she cried, with utter 
impatience. “ You’ve no more right or need to pay them than 
the Duke of Oban ! Do you think because his name’s on the 
prospectus, lieW go and empty his pockets for all those yelling 
brutes ? The works are at a stand-still for a little time for 
want of funds ; the men must take the rough with the smooth, 
the fat with the lean : they know that well enough. They 
can’t complain : let ’em look to the contractors who brought 
’em over to the work ! We’re not the contractors.” 

“ I shall pay them,” said loris. “ I shall pay them as long 
as I can, if I sell Fiordelisa.” 

“ Sell Fiordelisa !” 

She sprang erect on to her feet. No tigress bereft of her 
young ever darted into more vivid fury, more instantaneous 
ferocity of attack and defence. 

“ Sell Fiordelisa !” Was he mad ? was she ? was the world 
in its orbit? were the heavens shining around and above? 
Sell Fiordelisa ! 

Mr. Challoner, having pared the remaining nail on his little 
finger, with scrupulous attention, lifted his eyes and saw his 
wife transformed, her eyes blazing, her lips quivering, her 
head flung back, her voice ringing shrill as a clarion, her 
breath hissing fierce as a storm-wind. 

“ My love, you forget yourself,” said Mr. Challoner, with 
dignity, draping his toga and adjusting his countenance, though 
no one was there to behold it. “You forget yourself, Joan. 


FRIENDSHIP. 317 

If our friend wish to part with his estate, what is it to 
us?” 

And Mr. Challoner, having said this solemnly, only to re- 
lieve his conscience, for neither of his companions heard a 
syllable that he said, picked up the fallen letters and went to 
his own small study. 

He always withdrew from a scene. 

From the study, though afar off, he still heard the echo of 
his wife’s furious voice, as when shut in a mountain-cavern 
you hear the roll of the storm in the valley. 

Mr. Challoner lit a comfortable pipe of Oriental tobacco, 
and unfolded his “ Pall-Mall Gazette.” 

“ She will end with hysterics,” he thought, and looked at 
his watch. It still wanted three hours of dinner-time. The 
hysterics would have time to come and pass away before the 
hour should strike at which they were to go and dine with 
Lord and Lady Norwich, a fish dinner for Ash Wednesday, at 
which his wife would wear a different mask from the wire one 
of the Corso and the satin one of the Apollo. 

Mr. Challoner smoked on serenely. 

He felt regret, as he smoked, that Baron Chemnitz, a pillar 
of the temple of commerce, had not been able to think of any- 
thing better than those pistols in the damp Flemish field. 

He threw fuel on his stove and slipped his feet in slippers. 

From the distant apartment there still came dully through 
the closed doors the furious echo of his wife’s outcries. Mr. 
Challoner felt how thoroughly well Lucretius had understood 
human nature when he had penned that now hackneyed state- 
ment about the placid enjoyment of a tempest when one is 
safely housed oneself. 


CHAPTER XXVIII. 

A FEW nights later there was a dinner at the Casa Chal- 
loner, to which Etoile had been engaged three weeks before, 
that she might meet some expected friends of absent Lord 
Archie’s. He had begged them to see her, and had written 
to his daughter to that effect. They were called Denysons of 


318 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Kingsclere, people passing but a few days in Kome, learned, 
agreeable, and high-bred, who loved art and Lord Archie, and 
from the latter cause visited at the Casa Challoner, and for the 
former reason laughed very much at its artistic pretensions. 

When the evening came, Etoile felt reluctant to go ; she 
got into her dress listlessly, and hesitated as to whether she 
would not send word she was too fatigued and unwell : it 
would have been partially true ; a feverish depression weighed 
on her, and seemed to undo all the good the calm and mild 
winter had done her. 

“ You have been staying out of doors too much at sunset,” 
said her friends ; but she felt guilty as they said it : it was 
not the sunset ; it was rather that the trouble of another’s life 
was entering her own, and the agitation and unreality of it 
were moving her own, which had so long been serenely fixed 
in the deep tranquillities and truths of art. From the moment 
that another life has any empire on ours, peace is gone. 

Art spreads around us a profound and noble repose, but 
passion enters it and then art grows restless and troubled, as 
the deep sea at the call of the whirlwind. 

“ I will not go,” she said to herself; she felt to shudder 
from the touch of the hand which locked the fetters of loris 
on him. 

She leaned against the grating of her great casement, 
watching that sunset which is so oft maligned as the cause of 
those fevers that men and women’s follies, faults, and indiscre- 
tions bring upon themselves. It was burning beyond the dark 
lines of Monte Mario across the city ; she could see the radi- 
ance through the bars ; the rosy warmth fell across the wide 
square and made the pavement flush till it looked like porphyry. 
The piazza was empty, except for a brown-frocked monk and 
a little child dragging a quantity of arbute boughs, doomed to 
the dyers and cut down ere spring came. She watched the 
sunset, and did not see loris passing from the palace until he 
was beneath the casement ; it was not his nearest way home 
from the Quirinal, but he made it so very often. He uncov- 
ered his head and looked up with a smile ; the window was 
not much above him. He had been to see her early that 
morning. 

“ Are you dressed already ?” he said, in a little alarm. 
“ Am I so late, then ?” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


319 


“ My clock was fast. Yes, I am dressed ; but, if it were 
not rude, I would so willingly not go. I was thinking of 
excusing myself even now.” 

A quick fear leaped into his eyes. 

“ Oh, do not do that ! she would never forgive it.” 

“ Do you think I care either for what she forgives or re- 
venges ?” 

Etoile spoke with a sudden petulance new to her, leaning 
against the iron grating of the great embrasure. 

“ No, no,” he murmured ; “ of course not ; but she is a 
bitter foe, and it is not worth while. Come, pray come, for 
my sake !” 

Her eyes softened at the last words. 

“ It is for that I would stay away,” she said, a little impetu- 
ously. “ I mean, — speaking to me as you do of her, it is not 
possible to feel at ease either with myself or her.” 

“ We must all wear masks in the world,” said loris, with a 
little smile and a brilliant joy lighting his uplifted eyes, for 
her words had said to him more than she thought lay in them. 

“ I have never worn one,” she said, quickly. “ Where I 
could not feel frank friendship or at least honest indifference, 
I have never gone : it makes me ashamed, remembering all 
that you and I have said, to take her hand, to sit at her table. 
If slie knew, what would she say ?” 

A flush, that was not from the sunset, passed over his face. 

“ I will never ask you to do it again. But this once pray 
come, — for my sake !” 

He raised himself on the stone coping of the wall and passed 
his hand inside the grating and touched hers. 

“ I will not go if you do not,” he said, wilfully. “ Promise 
me.” 

“ This once ; no more.” 

“No more, then. Give me a rose to wear in my coat, — 
just one.” 

She smiled, and broke a half-blown rose off the plants in the 
Jardiniere and passed it through the bars to him, — a creamy 
tea-scented Niphetos. 

He kissed her fingers, and then the rose, uncovered his head 
once more, and went on quickly across the brightness of the 
square. 

She remained motionless, leaning against the casement. 


320 


FRIENDSHIP. 


A sense of oppression and of want of frankness and of 
faith weighed on her. Her creeds were not of the world. 

When she passed up the stairs of the Casa Challoner she 
felt cold, though the night was warm. The Turkish room 
was full when she entered, but all she saw in the blaze of 
lights was the face of loris ; he had a Niphetos rose in his 
coat. 

He came forward, when all others had saluted her, with his 
grave ceremonious grace of greeting. “ Trhs-honore de vous 
voir, Comtesse. La sante va hicn 

“ How distant he is with her,” thought his hostess, with glee. 
“ Marjory must make a mistake. I am sure he never sees her, — 
except here.” 

The dinner passed off well. 

For the first time Etoile saw Lady Joan in her court mantle 
of stiff and irreproachable propriety. The Denysons of Kings- 
clere were not people to be trifled with ; and though they had 
had the bad taste to wish to meet a Parisian artist, and had 
discomfited her a good deal by bringing that request from her 
father, still they were persons so irreproachably placed and so 
highly cultured that she dared play no antics with them. She 
had asked some fashionable Russians and some aristocratic 
Italians to meet them, had a Monsignore and a very learned 
German Professor, had put on the Genoa velvet, fresh paint, 
and English propriety, set loris far away from herself at table, 
and discoursed with seriousness, decorousness, and amiability. 

Etoile sat near her, and, herself very silent, listened and 
watched the scene set and rehearsed for the Denysons of 
Kingsclere. 

Every word seemed to her as if it should bring down some 
such swift judgment of heaven as smote Sapphira’s lie. She, 
who knew the truth, seemed to look down into this woman’s 
soul and see all its shifts and sophistries, all its nakedness and 
meanness, until her own heart grew sick. Her own cheeks 
grew hot with shame, her own eyes grew dark with scorn ; 
she was absent, and scarcely heard what was said to herself ; 
she was thinking all the while, “ Oh, well may the world be 
sick, since all its food is lies I” 

And on the other side, far down across the lights and the 
flowers and the glass she saw the Niphetos rose in loris’s 
breast. 


FRIENDSHIP. 321 

“ Your Muse is a very silent one,” said Sir Walter Denyson 
to his hostess, having watched Etoile some time. 

“ She would talk if lo were near her,” said Lady Joan, 
with a short laugh. 

“ Does she favor your friend, then ?” 

“ I believe so ; but he’s only bored by it at present. Per- 
haps he will be entangled later on ; he is rather weak, you 
know,” said his hostess, in a whisper, with another laugh. 

Sir Walter, who knew his friend Archie’s daughter pretty 
well, was mystified, and said afterwards to his wife that he did 
not fancy Joan cared much about that good-looking Italian, 
though she did live in his house : she did not seem to think 
much of him. 

The dinner over and the guests gathered once more in the 
Turkish room, which looked very pretty with flowers in the 
old blue and white bowls, and coflee served in little jewel- 
lilce Persian cups. Lady Joan went to the piano, and her watch- 
dog came in in time to accompany her It was not a night 
for the guitar ; the guitar in all its forms, viol, lyre, chitarra, 
or mandolin, is a melodious and romantic instrument, sugges- 
tive of love-trysts and moonlight ; the piano is an unpleasant 
piece of mechanism, invented to spoil the human voice, and 
domestic and respectable in proportion to its unpleasantness. 
On propriety nights, Lady Joan always sang to the piano. 

loris, at the moment that his hostess was singing, passed 
across the chamber to where Etoile was resting on one of the 
divans. 

“ What beautiful lace, Comtesse ! point d’Argentan, is it 
not ?” he said, touching the lace of her dress ; then added, 
very low, — 

“ How can I thank you for coming ? but you seem out of 
spirits, grave, constrained. What is it ?” 

“ I feel treacherous, — untrue !” murmured Etoile, wearily, 
all the scorn and pain she felt glancing for one instant from 
her eyes to his. 

“ It is not you that are so,” he said, with a sad tenderness. 
“ But you are quite right. This is no atmosphere for you. 
I will not ask you to come again ” 

“ No. I will never come again.” 

And she kept her word. 

“ What a charming fan 1” said loris, for the benefit of Sir 
0 * 


322 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Walter, wlio was hovering near, longing to approach her, and 
loris took the fan and talked of its epoch, Louis Seize, and 
of fan-painters, and of the genre rocaille^ on all of which he 
could speak with judgment, knowledge, and that infinite grace 
which characterized the least thing that he did or said, and 
Sir Walter, watching his occasion, joined in the conversation, 
and found the Muse still silent. 

When Etoile left, which was early, loris could not take 
her to her carriage, for the host himself performed that office, 
but loris, giving her back her fan, found means to murmur 
in her ear, — 

I shall go away with the others. The night is over for 
me ; I have my talisman with me, — my rose.” 

“ Coqum ! you play the spy for your wife !” he muttered 
between his teeth, as standing above in the vestibule he 
watched the form of Mr. Challoner pass down the staircase ; 
and his heart beat angrily within him under the Niphetos rose. 

“ lo ! come here !” cried the Lady Joan, as he returned to 
her Turkish room. “ Here is Sir Walter raving with jealousy 
of you : he says Etoile would hardly look at him, she seems 
so much in love with you.” 

“But indeed I never ” began Sir Walter, in protest. 

“ Monsieur, I am not so happy,” said loris, with his coldest 
smile and airiest grace. “ No Muse will stoop to earth for 
me ; and as for the tender passions — -je suis un homme mort /” 

“ You do not look it,” said Sir Walter, with a smile. 

Lady Joan frowned heavily. 


CHAPTER XXIX. 

Lent had come, and Lady Joan had her black domino 
and loup hung up in a closet, and put on the meeting-house 
clothes very demurely, and devoted herself in this pious and 
dreary period of social life to those especial patron saints of 
hers, the “ people passing through.” The “ people passing 
through” were rather bored in Lent, and were glad to be 
taken about by her to Mimo’s and Trillo’s to fill up the dull 
mornings; and in the evening to dine with her — “just by 


FRIENDSHIP. 


323 


ourselves, you know, — nothing but fish” — or ask her to din- 
ner at their various hotels. In Lent, Lady Joan was always 
as hard at work as the chiming bells and the swinging censers; 
it was her harvest-time, when she looked forward to gathering 
in the fruits of all the seeds of good-nature, hospitality, atten- 
tion, and love of the fine arts, which she had been sowing 
so broadcast ever since early winter. “ The people passing 
through” were always beginning by that time to think of 
passing out ; and it was not her fault if they did not bear with 
them, as “ homing” birds are said to bear foreign seeds, in- 
numerable praises of the Casa Challoner and also numerous 
articles out of it. 

She had borne with the burden of the Lady Blanks all 
winter ; she had endured like the stanchest of martyrs their 
pomposity or prolixity, their coldness or their curiosity : she 
had toiled early and late to smile on them and their heavy 
connubial moiety, magistrate, member of parliament, or peer- 
age nonenity ; their pink, long-limbed, long-lipped daughters ; 
their straw-colored monosyllabic sons; their general infinite 
ponderousness, weariness, and pre-eminent respectability. She 
had borne them all with patience inexhaustible, with fortitude 
unsurpassable. 

It was in Lent that she looked for her rewards ; it was in 
Lent that the Lady Blanks asked her to mornings of classical 
music and teas for colonial bishops ; that the pink-cheeked 
daughters and the straw-colored sons rode over and lunched at 
Fiordelisa; that the connubial moieties became of the sheep 
that the crook of Mr. Challoner guarded, or, if less obliging 
than that, at least bought a Parmegianino or a Tabernacle, a 
fine bit of buhl, or a nice piece of old Modena tapestry. 

Lent was her harvest, when the narcissi and the tulips were 
all out in the Campagna, and the Northerners began to feel 
hot and to get in a fright about fever, and the families were 
pleased to breath the hill-air of Fiordelisa; and the Lady 
Blanks would say, “ See you in town this season? — yes? — oh ! 
— yes ? Delighted ;” and resolved that, after all her civility, 
they must certainly know her in London. 

In Lent the Lady Blanks kept her busy, and Fiordelisa was 
better seen without its lord, so that in Lent loris was freer 
than at any other season of the year. 

In the long, still, sunny mornings, when she was escorting 


324 


FRIENDSHIP. 


the Lady Blanks to Mimo’s and Trillo’s, or riding out with 
the straw-colored sons to Fiordelisa, he found his way to the 
flower-filled chamber of Etoile, and passed the hours in that 
sweet atmosphere of sympathy, that vague ecstatic trouble 
which fills the daybreak of love with a light that is only the 
lovelier for its clouds. 

He found a repose with her that was even sweeter than 
passion. He was true with her, and before her ; here was her 
essential charm to him. Whoever has to wear a mask is in a 
sense ill at ease. In the presence of Etoile he threw his mask 
away. His real nature — impulsive, generous, erring, repent- 
ant, tender, contemptuous, sensitive, ironical, by turns — was 
laid bare to her. He did not speak all the truth to her, 
but he spoke nothing that was not the truth. 

It was a sort of bond with him to her to feel that he did 
not deceive her. The perpetual strain. of the comedy in which 
he had always to play his part in the Casa Challoner became 
wearisome ; and as his mistress never suspected that he wore 
a mask he never dared to unloosen it. With this other woman, 
who understood him and stripped the velvet off his mask and 
saw the pasteboard underneath, he could toss it aside without 
disguise, and laugh at the use of it or sigh at the use of it, 
whichever his mood might be. 

It may be doubted if a man is ever really happy with a 
woman with whom he cannot be candid. The charm of in- 
timacy lies in perfect ease. To need a lie is to endure a 
restraint. 

When tired and perplexed with the chaos in which his for- 
tunes were whirling, in the darkness of disasters that he scarcely 
understood and still less knew how to confront, he escaped from 
them as into paradise to the quiet painted chamber, with the 
mellow sunlight sleeping on the whiteness of the Lenten lilies. 

Now and then he asked himself, “ Where am I drifting ?” 
but he waited for no answer, and drifted on with closed eyes. 

With his mistress he had never been happy. His heart for 
a while had been “ burned in the poisonous solvent” which tens 
of thousands take for love, knowing no better or loftier thing 
all their lives long; but the poison had burned itself away and 
left as its dregs disquietude and satiety. With Etoile he was 
happy as a man can only be when the better nature in him is 
satisfied and not ashamed. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


325 


Yet, partly because it was a natural instinct with him to 
conceal what most he felt, partly from the same sense that 
makes a man shy of his religion being touched or his emotions 
laughed at, chiefly because he was always afraid of the ruthless 
vengeance of his tyrant on any thought of his that wandered 
from herself, he began to deny as Hamlet denied, forgetful that 
such denials fall lightly as rain, but, like a raindrop on the 
trusty steel, may turn to rust and eat a cruel road. 

Maijory Scrope, going to and fro to her weary labors of 
copying the Rospigliosi Aurora for Lord Fingal, saw again 
once — twice — thrice in one week the tall, slender form of loris 
passing across the Square of the Four Horses, and told her- 
self, with a quickly-throbbing heart, that he was only going to 
the Quirinal, but saw, despite her longing not to see, that he 
did not bear towards the Quirinal, but towards the old, gray, 
ancient mansion where Etoile lived amidst her frescoes and 
her flowers. 

Marjory, toiling across the last stones of the square in the 
blast of the stormy Lenten wind, grew sick and pale, grew 
faint with fear, and as she sat at her work saw the faces of 
Aurora and the Hours through a mist, and sketched the horses 
of the chariot out of drawing. 

As much as her work would let her have liberty to do, — 
for Lord Fingal was in haste for his copy, and she in haste to 
see the check for it, — she kept a spy’s watch upon the old 
palace by the Colonna gardens; she talked with its porter, she 
went past it in daybreak and dusk ; she longed to find some- 
thing, she hardly knew what, something, anything, against the 
woman that dwelt there. It was so bitterly hard to her : she 
had to copy all day and get a pittance at the end of her labors, 
or, if she got more, knew that more was only given out of 
charity and sympathy because she was a marquis’s grand- 
daughter and thought praiseworthy so to work for her living. 
And Etoile, — half an hour’s rough sketch in charcoal from the 
hand of Etoile would fetch two hundred guineas in any city 
of Europe ! 

As she went to and fro across the square, in sunlight or 
showers, the horses of Etoile would bespatter her with dust 
or with mud, or she fancied they did, if they passed by twenty 
yards olf. Watching the door, she would see loris pass through 
with the easy and accustomed air of one who goes where he is 


326 


FRIENDSHIP. 


expected and is certain of his reception. Sometimes as she 
went home, with her portfolio under her arm, as evening fell 
she would see Etoile come out to go to some dinner at Princess 
Vera’s, or some informal “ at home” at the Palazzo Farnese. 
She watched and watched, and hated and hated. 

She was a prudent creature under all her bitterness ; other- 
wise she could have torn her copy of the Aurora into shreds 
with hatred of herself for having to sit copying there whilst 
this woman, who could make her hundreds in an hour, sat 
doing nothing amidst her palms and hyacinths and smiling 
in the face of Idris ! 

“ I see you often in the Montecavallo, lo,” she was imprudent 
enough to say once, biting her lip, and relying on their long 
intimacy. 

loris looked surprised and unconscious. 

“ But certainly — I go often to the Quirinal.” 

“It is not the Quirinal that I meant,” she said, sharply. 
“ You go to Etoile.” ^ 

loris, who was smoking, looked at his cigarette and shrugged 
his shoulders. 

“ But seldom. One cannot always refuse ; she does me the 
honor to ask me things about Borne : she is composing a Bo- 
man picture. She has been spoilt by her world : she is used 
to rule, and is easily put out.” 

He said it very tranquilly : it was his impulse always to slip 
on his velvet mask before interrogation. 

Marjory Scrope looked at him sharply. He only partially 
deceived her. 

“ What does it matter to you whether she is put out or not, 
since you dislike her?” 

loris shrugged his shoulders once more. 

“ Mali ! she is a woman ; one cannot be rude. You know 
I never say no. Bo not you and Joanna always reproach me 
with my weakness?” 

Marjory laughed uneasily. 

“ I suppose she is going to paint you in the Boman picture 
and make you celebrated forever?” 

“ Trop d' honnenr said loris, with a careless smile. “No, 
it is purely archaeological details that I give her. You know 
I like to trace the old ways under the new. I am of a little 
use to her, — not much.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


327 


“ Arid what is this — archaeological — picture ?” 

“ The chariot of Tullia,” said loris, with ready invention. 
He knew the invention was safe : his questioner would not 
dare to question the great artist as to her future works. 

Marjory looked at him, and still was but half deceived. 

“ I do not believe the least in this archaeology. I believe 
you are in love with her !” she said, with a nervous and 
anxious laugh. 

“ I have never even liked her,” said loris, with an admir- 
able nonchalance. 

“Nor have I,” he thought to himself, “because I have 
always loved her.” 

Why would they question him ? They deserved to get a 
lie for their pains. And indeed people who ask a man about 
a woman do merit this punishment. 

“ What’s all this about an archaeological picture, lo ?” said 
the Lady Joan, fiercely, a day later. “ Marjory says you are 
helping Etoile about a new painting. Is it true ? Because, 
if it’s true, I won’t have it. She’ll be putting your portrait 
in it ; I know she will. W^hat do you mean by going there ? 
And I thought she did not paint at all ; that the doctors had 
forbidden her. What lies she tells !” 

“ Calm yourself, ma clihre^^' said loris, with a tranquillizing 
gesture. “ There is no falsehood at all. She is thinking out 
a great picture, — studying details for it j that is all. Where 
is the harm ?” 

“ Oh, I suppose she wants to paint something because she 
makes all her money by painting,” said the Lady Joan, with 
unutterable scorn : she herself sold what other people painted, 
which is a much loftier occupation. “ But what do you want 
to have anything to do with it for?” she continued, still 
fiercely. “ It’s ridiculous going there, wasting your time with 
her. She’s horribly rude to we, — refused my last two invita- 
tions, and scarcely took the trouble to make even an excuse. 
I wanted her to meet Victor Louche. I believe she’s afraid 
of all he knows about her.” 

loris, in an imprudent moment, laughed contemptuously, 
and Lady Joan, infuriated, continued: 

“ I won’t have you go 1 If she can’t paint her pictures 
alone, let ’em go unpainted. She never did paint ’em alone ; 
I always told you so. She always got men to help her, — 


328 


FRIENDSHIP. 


always. She’s laying a trap; I can see that. She never 
comes near me now ; scarcely calls. After all that I’ve done 
for her ! I can see through her drift well enough. Does she 
dare talk of me to you ?” 

“ Mais^ ma chere ! — as if I should allow any one to profane 
your name to me !” 

“ Profane fiddlesticks !” cried Lady Joan, in a fury. “ I’m 
certain she knows ; I’m certain she guesses.” 

loris was silent. It was a delicate subject. 

“ You wouldn’t go near her if you respected me,” said Lady 
Joan, more and more in a fury. “ I knew what she thought 
that first day up at Fiordelisa. I could see it in her eyes. I 
dare say she’s gone and written to my father. It is disgrace- 
ful. You have no decency, lo, and no sense, to go and see 
that woman, and sit with her and talk over me. Oh, it is no 
use your saying anything. Archaeology ! Rubbish ! When 
ever did you care about archaeology ? You care about a new 
face, a trick of manner, a way of looking as if the earth and 
everybody on it were dust and dirt and muck and mire ! 
That’s new, and takes your fancy, and you forget all my sacri- 
fices, all I have endured, all I have risked, all I have ” 

Hysterics choked her. 

loris rose and paced the chamber. 

“ This is absurd, intolerable !” he muttered, half aloud. 
He was tempted to fling off his mask and throw it at her feet 
for good and aye. 

“ Is it absurd that you think an adventuress an angel ?” she 
screamed, with a shrill hiss. 

“ I think no woman an angel : who can who has had the 
happiness to live with you ?” he interrupted her, with a chill 
laugh that barbed the dubious compliment and sent it home 
through the triple mantle of her vanity. 

“ Oh, no, I never claim to be one,” she said, bitterly : “ I 
leave such pretensions for those who have more wit to paint 
their wings than I have ; for those who fool you with child- 
like eyes and the seriousness of a would-be Muse and some 
paltry talk of the Greek gods and heroes. When it is for her 
you neglect me, — forget me, — insult me ” 

“ Who has insulted you ? When do you ever let yourself 
be forgotten ? What is the use of my coming to you ? You 
only receive me with reproach and reprimand,” said loris, tak- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


329 


ing refuge in answering anger, and letting escape him a touch 
of all the sombre irritation of which his soul was full. “ What 
do you require that I do not give up ? Is there any moment 
of my time my own ? You even claim to know my thoughts 
better than I know them. Do I ever rebel ? Do I take my 
freedom, as other men would? Ma ch^re, be reasonable. 
You treat me like a spaniel : you chain me and you cuff 
me. Cannot you be content? I am your dog, if it be not 
an affront to any dog to say so.” 

He spoke with the bitter though subdued detestation of 
himself, and of his bondage, that day by day was growing 
sterner and stronger in him ; and the mere glimpse of any 
such passion in him filled her with terror. 

If he had only read her aright, he might with ease have 
been her master. 

This was not the first of such scenes that the last few weeks 
had witnessed ; not the first muttering of that storm of revolt 
which some day or another she felt would burst above her 
head and wrench from her not only himself but — Fiordelisa. 
She grew terrified ; her breath failed her before the vision that 
for a moment flashed before her eyes. Had she wrung the 
galled withers once too often ? Had she strained a strand too 
far the ever-yielding rope ? 

She fell at his feet in a tempest of emotion, rage, fear, sus- 
picion, apprehension, all seething in her, as angry seas seethe 
under the lightning and the hurricane of a storm. 

Vast is the power of turbulence; it will conquer when all 
that is holy, that is tender, that is long-suffering, that is noble, 
shrink away unheard and disregarded. 

loris might have ruled her had he read her aright ; but, 
alas ! he missed the occasion to seize the mastery. He let her 
rave on, and drooped his head to the storm. 

When she was somewhat calmer he kissed her hands. 

“ Caris^ma mia, you excite yourself needlessly,” he said, 
and bent his knee beside her. “ If it be as you fancy, — if 
any one divine your amiable goodness to me, — the more need 
is it to lull such suspicions by not displaying any jealousy of 
me : you must see that, do you not? Be tranquil.” 

You will never go to her, then, — never?” muttered his 
tyrant, clenching hands on his wrist. 

“ Never ; or at the utmost merely as much as courtesy and 
28 * 


330 


FRIENDSHIP. 


caution require,” said loris. “ Pray be tranquil, mia cara ! 
These scenes distress me unspeakably. There is no kind of 
ground for them.” 

She grew calmer and was convinced. 

loris as he knelt there felt none of the composure that he 
affected so admirably. His temples ached with the scream of 
her voice, his pulses thrilled with apprehension and anger, his 
heart beat with a stifled shame and a stifled rage. He was 
tempted by a great longing to fling off the mask and tell the 
truth and bid her do her worst. 

But he hesitated ; the old habit of subserviency to her was 
on him heavy and paralyzing. He believed also that he was 
vitally necessary to her, the very breath of her life ; he was 
reluctant to strike her so dread a blow ; he was afraid ,to rise 
and say to his tyrant, “ I will be free !” 

“ Another time,” he said to himself ; another time he would 
confess to her that his allegiance was a lifeless thing of habit 
and of duty. Another time he would say to her, “ Love is 
not in our command, and mine is dead.” 

“ Another time.” 

And he murmured words that were false, and spent caresses 
that were joyless and faithless, and knew that he was false to 
his fairest faith, yet had not strength to unclasp the hands 
that held him and put back the mouth that wooed him, and 
say the simple truth : “ Our love is dead !” 

He left the house ill at ease and ashamed, conscious that he 
had been disloyal to all the best emotions of his nature ; feel- 
ing as though he had forever lost the right to look into the 
clear, proud eyes of Etoile. 

Yet he fancied he would have done more wrong had he 
risen up boldly and told the truth to his mistress and broken 
from the unholy bonds that held him. 

The curious honor of his world and of his sex was about 
him like the fetters of an encircling serpent about the living 
flesh, paralyzing action and numbing and deadening life. The 
woman that was worthless in his sight was sacred. The 
woman that was sacred in his sight was sacrificed. 

He fancied this was honor ; and if the men of his genera- 
tion could have been put to the vote they would have declared 
it honor too. 

For men of the world have set up an idol called honor 


FRIENDSHIP. 


331 


'whicli is a false idol, very foolish, very clumsy, very cruel, yet 
to which they immolate themselves with a sincerity and a 
stupidity that are touching, and immolate oftentimes those 
dear to them. 

According to this idol the fiat goes forth that a man may 
blamelessly desert an innocent woman, but not a guilty one ; 
he may break the heart of the bruised lily, and no harm done, 
but he must bide the brunt with perjured Guinevere, or be 
man-sworn. It is curious reasoning and illogical, and the 
results brutal and often tragical; but men in adhering to it 
are quite honest. 

It is this honesty which women sharp of sight and keen 
of execution turn with ruthless skill to their own purposes. 

Men are never as clever as they think themselves, and are 
generally much better than other people suppose them. 

“ loris is in love with Etoile !” said his mistress, showing 
her white teeth in her harsh laugh, but airing her indifference, 
as she rang the changes on the same subject a little later the 
very next day, when, as it chanced, Etoile was carelessly 
named in her presence by Douglas Graeme after luncheon. 

“ What folly !” said loris, angrily ; and his heart beat 
thickly, for he felt once again a coward and untrue. 

“ I believe you are !” she cried, glad to say so, since her 
cousin, Douglas Graeme, was by to hear. “ I do believe you 
are ! Well, if it be so, gave d vans ! I should not wish to see 
any friend of mine in her toils.” 

Douglas Graeme opened his blue eyes wide. 

“ You mean the great painter that I have seen at your 
house? Oh, she is as cold as ice; every one knows that; 

she is quite indifierent to men. If loris ” 

Has touched her, he has a marvellous conquest, I suppose 
you mean ?” said the Lady Joan, with impatience. “ How 
can you believe such trash? Innocent! So is a flower-pot 
innocent; but when the crickets and mice tumble into it, 
where it’s set to trap them covered over with moss, I don’t 
fancy they think so, do they ? Do you believe she made all 
the money she spends by her pictures ? Good heavens, Douglas, 
where have you lived ? Are you in short frocks still ?” 

“ I do not understand,” began her cousin, who looked 
bewildered. 

loris grew a shade paler. 


332 


FRIENDSHIP, 


“ It would, at least, be well to respect your father’s friend 
and your own guest,” he said, in a low tone ; but there were 
a sternness and a menace in his voice which were new from 
his lips and strange to her ear. 

“ A woman my father’s seen once or twice in a few studios I” 
she said, with boundless scorn. “ How can you call her his 
friend?” 

“ Because she is so.” 

“ She is nothing of the kind ! She is the daughter of that 
old beast Voightel, and my father is a fool about anything that 
Voightel ” 

“ You said the other day she was found in the streets.” 

“So she was. Voightel never noticed her till she grew 
famous, — if you call it famous, — thanks to David Israels in his 
dotage.” 

“Is all the world in its dotage, then, also?” 

“ Very likely it is. What are her pictures, after all ? No- 
thing but would-be Geromes ; rank imitations of all his besti- 
alities. Tom Tonans says so. They wouldn’t hang them 
even in England.” 

“ It is a pity — for England.” 

loris rose, as he said so, and lighted a cigar. 

Lady Joan burst into a boisterous laugh. 

“ You see he’s in love, don’t you, Douglas ?’ 

“ He has been so a long time, my cousin : we all are,” said 
Douglas Graeme, gallantly, being desirous of preventing a 
scene. 

“ Stuff 1” said his cousin, too violently irritated in her own 
soul to be pacified with any such mere compliment. “ He is 
in love with Etoile : you see he is in love with Etoile. He 
frowns if one says a syllable, and can’t talk of her without 
turning pale or red. Poor lo ! Can’t you find anybody better 
to erect into an angel than a Paris Sappho that has knocked 
about Bohemian ateliers all her days, and gets herself up in 
intellect and innocence to please you, as she drapes her lay 
figure in calico and calls it Pudicitia ? Do be more sensible, 
pray. Take some Vittoria Colonna of your own nationality : 
you can know all about Aer.” 

loris shrugged his shoulders and turned his back. 

“ Your interest in me is most benevolent,” he said, for the 
benefit of Douglas Graeme. “ But I am not in the peril you 


FRIENDSHIP. 333 

imagine, foi dlionneur. And, if you will allow me to correct 
you, Sappho did not paint.” 

loris went away angered deeply and a little ashamed of 
himself. 

He felt as the faithless follower felt when the cock crew, — 
as all feel who let a treachery pass by unpunished and condoned 
by a cowardly silence. He felt disloyal with a twofold dis- 
loyalty. As for the slander, it was the mere venomous breath 
of a jealous woman ; so he said to himself. He could have 
laughed aloud at it, it seemed so ludicrous to him, so clumsy, 
so poor. Yet it clung about him like a noxious vapor that 
hangs in the air. 

You cannot strike the vapor, nor seize it, nor see it ; yet it 
is there, spoiling all sweet genial weather and flower-scented 
breezes, and making the glad day sickly. 

The lie seemed to buzz about him like a mosquito stinging 
in the sunshine. 

Lady Joan, left alone, sat lost in thought. On calm reflec- 
tion she was convinced that her friend Marjory’s apprehensions 
resulted only from the fags and fancies of her friend Marjory’s 
brain, whose weakness of hopeless jealousy she knew. 

“ Of course he cares for nobody but me,” she thought. 
She filled the universe to herself ; she was convinced that she 
filled it equally to him. She was easily lulled, easily blinded, 
because her immeasurable vanity was forever between her and 
any truth. 

She was envious of Etoile, she distrusted the influence of 
Ktoile, and she hated her for her glance, for her words, for her 
modes of life, for her scarcely-veiled contempt, — for anything 
and everything, — as only one woman can hate another. 

But Lady Joan, though Cleopatra in her idle hours, was 
not a Cleopatra to whom Mark Antony was all. She was a 
Cleopatra to whom her ships, her freights, her slaves, her allies, 
and her merchandise in general were always more than her 
hero ; and at this moment she was a Cleopatra overburdened 
wdth many prosaic anxieties. 

She had caught fire as easily as tow held to a match to the 
incendiary whispers of her friend, and had flamed fiercely as 
petroleum ; but the flame had soon died down, and only burned 
dully among the embers of sullen fears. loris gone, and 
Douglas Graeme also, she grew a prey to more solid and more 


334 


FRIENDSHIP. 


terrestrial anxieties than those of passion. Her bureau was 
inundated with papers and her head was filled with plans ; acres 
of arithmetic spread out before her eyes, and reams of cor- 
respondence, with telegrams in cipher, aroused and tore her 
from the preoccupation of amorous doubts. 

Beyond everything she was a woman of business. 

She went across to her husband’s little sanctum and opened 
the door. 

“ Robert, come out and talk over my idea.” 

Mr. Challoner, who was busy writing, took his eyeglasses 
off his nose and emerged from his den. 

“ It is of little use to talk,” he said, gloomily : “ it is time 
to act.” 

“ Of course it is. That’s just what I want to see you about. 
One ought to go there directly.” 

“ One ought,” said Mr. Challoner, still deep in gloom. 
“ Besides, you must not give any more dinners ; really the 
cost ” 

“ I’m sure we’ve everything from Fiordelisa, except the 
fish,” said his wife, “and the foreign wines and the sweet- 
meats. And I shall go on giving dinners till I go, — if I do 
go. People are nasty the moment you don’t stop their mouths 
with a dinner. What do you think, by the way, Marjory told 
me this morning about Etoile ? — that lo’s in love with her ! 
Did you ever know such an idiotic absurdity ?” 

Mr. Challoner was too wrapped in gloom to smile, though 
the ghost of what might in happier circumstances have been 
a smile came upon his face. 

“ I saw it coming on long ago ; indeed, the very night she 
came here,” he replied, tranquilly ; and he did, even in his 
gloom, rather enjoy saying that. 

His wife’s eyes flashed fire. 

“ Oh, did you ?” she said, roughly. “ You’re always very 
clever in seeing through a millstone, and never see an inch 
before your own nose. lo’s just told me he can’t endure her.” 

“ It does not interest me either way,” said Mr. Challoner, 
drearily. “ Did you call me to tell me that ?” 

“ Of course not,” said Lady Joan, searching among her 
cipher telegrams and her acres of arithmetic. 

“ I want you to read all these, and decide whether you 
think we can do it.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 335 

Mr. Challoner grumbled, fixed his glasses, and busied him- 
self in her papers. 

She was as great as that Emperor of Byzantium who ruled 
the East and the West, yet busied himself selling his hens’ 
eggs and bought diamonds with the proceeds. 

Were it a question of five francs for a cofiee-cup or five 
millions for a concession, she was equal to either fortune. 
Nobody could say that she despised trifies. She might be 
marking out a royal subsidy in her meditations, but if any- 
body came in that wanted a length of lace she devoted herself 
to the lace. She really ought to have been a greater woman 
than she was ; but then, alas ! her vanity obscured her vision : 
it was a myopia which impeded her way to entire success. 

Mr. Challoner knew this very well, and on occasions even 
said it — flatly. Then they had a battle-royal. But they did 
not have a battle now, as he gave all his mind to her telegrams 
and arithmetic. 

She was at this time almost too much overwhelmed with busi- 
ness, dearly as she loved it. She was sending Titian’s “ Choice 
of Paris” off to the most puissant Imperial Government of 
Picklehaube, for which an Inspector of Fine Arts, more en- 
lightened than the Bussians are, had just purchased it. She 
felt that she would miss the eight-feet-high nudities behind 
her dinner-table sadly, but she obeyed beyond anything the 
injunction, “ Put money i’ thy purse, put money i’ thy purse.” 
She was also shipping off several Old Masters to a loan collec- 
tion in Edinburgh. Her name looked well in the catalogues, 
and the loan meant generally an eventual sale to some wealthy 
body or another visiting the collection. Again, and first and 
foremost, she had a great transaction in meditation. 

Lady Joan loved transactions ; she always found them 
lucrative. “ Keep on turning money : some will always stick 
to your fingers,” said a capitalist once; and she thought the 
same. 

The present transaction was no less a one than the medi- 
tated transfer of the Societii Italiana-Inglese del Ponte Cala- 
brese-Siciliano from one body of shepherds to another. 

The Duke of Oban had withdrawn from the presidency in 
disgust and with strong language, expressed in rough Doric ; 
the sheep that were as silly as swine were rushing down their 
slope with such headlong hiiste and uproar that all the world 


336 


FRIENDSHIP. 


could hear them, and Mr. Challoner with his crook could do 
nothing to stop them. The workmen down on the coast, by 
the sunken piles and the devouring sea, had been paid for some 
weeks at the cost of loris ; she began to foresee that if things 
went on at this rate Fiordelisa would be imperilled, let her 
shriek as she would. 

Lying awake at nights between her evening’s cotillons and 
her morning’s hric-d-brac^ she had turned it over and over all 
Carnival in her busy brain, and now that with Lent things 
were really at a climax and could not well be worse anyhow, 
her busy brain had cleverly hit on a transfer. 

If a transfer could only be accomplished everything would 
be .saved (except the sheep that were as silly as swine), and 
everything would be changed (except Mr. Challoner’s crook). 
Now, in the whole length and breadth of the financial world, 
as on the turf, there is nothing so difficult as to “ raise a dead 
’un in the betting nothing so arduous as to float once more 
into the ambient air a bubble that has already collapsed and 
burst. 

It is quite easy to inflate a new commercial balloon ; nothing 
easier. A door-plate, a good name or two, and plenty of ad- 
vertisements ; these are all that is necessary. There need be 
nothing behind the door-plate, nobody behind the names ; the 
advertisements will do all that is required, if only the thing 
be new, quite new. Now, the Messina bridge was not new ; 
it was an exploded rocket, a pulled cracker, a melted sorbet^ an 
umbrella turned inside out, — anything, indeed, that is limp, 
collapsed, exhausted, and done for; but the energy of the 
Lady Joan was not to be daunted by these facts. Indeed, she 
cared very little for facts at any time. 

Facts were for the odious people that carried dates at their 
fingers’ ends and a list of pottery-marks in their pockets, who 
went to museums to verify their history, and to their bankers 
to know the wisdom of any enterprise : she was above such 
little trivialities of common sense as facts. 

So she resolved to set afloat on the markets of the world a 
transfer. 

“ But, mia carissima^" objected Mimo Burletta, in a simile 
born of his trade, “ the poor pot is dropped, broken all to 
pieces : you cannot make it whole again ! You cannot.” 

“Stuff!” said the Lady Joan. “Don’t you join ’em with 


FRIENDSHIP. 337 

white of egg and paint ’em all over when your pots break ? 
So shall I.” 

Mimo was silent : he was aware of the excellence of the 
process. Occasionally, horrid people called connoisseurs would 
scrape with a penknife, and discover the white of egg, and the 
paint that was over the glaze, instead of under it. But then 
connoisseurs are few. He smiled at them when he met them, 
as the Romans at death, but he never offered to sell them any- 
thing. Were there financial connoisseurs on the Exchanges? 
Mimo did not know. He felt muddled, and did not venture 
on any more remonstrance. 

“ She is a great creature,” he thought to himself : there 
were always the pigs to show that, the lovely pink pigs slowly 
maturing to succulent bacon, in the patent English galvanized- 
iron pig-styes out at Fiordelisa. 

And she prepared to join her broken pot and paint it. 

She projected a transfer, f.e., the same plant, the same 
projects, the same society, but a new purchase by new pur- 
chasers, an issue of new shares, and an entirely new pros- 
pectus. 

Modern enterprises mainly consist of a prospectus, as a 
tadpole of its head. 

She also intended to have a new name. She meant to call 
her piles in the sand, etc., “ The Mediterranean Company for 
the Facilitation of Communication in the South.” 

This was beautifully vague, and would also allow for the 
driving in of other piles into many other places on the sea- 
shores of Europe and Africa. 

Lady Joan had not lived in Damascus without learning a good 
deal about speculation. In Asia and Africa speculators of all 
kinds are as many as the mosquitoes. In the wasted garden 
of the world, English bankers, French financiers, Greek and 
Italian and German agents d'affaires., Jews of all sorts and 
sizes, fatten there as fatten the locusts, and like the locusts 
devour everything ere harvest be due. The dream-cities of 
the “ Arabian Nights” are the stews in which the children 
of Israel gorge, and the splendid and lovely lands that were 
once the envy of Alexander, and the amaze of Herodotus, are 
now in their misery delivered over to the oppression and the 
extortion of tyrants far viler than Pharaoh or Mithridates, 
Tamerlane or Aurungzcbe, tyrants whose sceptre is a pen, 
r 29 


ms 


FRIENDSHIP. 


who^e throne is a greasy office-stool, and whose symbol is a 
pair of shears. 

Far and wide, from the Fellah of Egypt to the Arab of 
Lebanon, from the negro that slaves in iSoudan to the Bud- 
dhist that toils among the canebrakes on the Irrawaddy, one 
and all bend their backs to the rod of the European adventurer, 
one and all are stript and cheated and plundered and sacrificed, 
to put money in the purses of contractor and commission 
agent ; one and all pay by the sweat of their brow and the 
famine of their bodies for the curse of civilization that falls 
across them, devastating as drought, blighting as the close 
clouds of locusts when the sun grows dark with them. 

Prostrate the East lies, to be strangled and sheared by the 
West. 

How dare it complain ? The adventurers bring it in return 
a steam-engine and a religion. 

Lady Joan had not so long watched this shearing process 
without learning more or less how to do it, and getting a pair 
of scissors if not a pair of shears. 

Indeed, so throughly congenial was the East to her by reason 
of the perpetual clipping which is possible there, that it was a 
very great pity she ever had left it. Italy, since it has en- 
joyed freedom, has felt the shears a good deal, but it is never 
so possible to wield them incessantly in the temperate zone. 
People talk, and things get into the papers, in Europe; in 
Asia you are beyond all that. 

At this juncture Lady Joan sighed for Asia ; on revieM ton- 
jours d ses premiers amours. In Asia the workmen never 
would have dared to squeal for wages ; there would have been 
the kouhash on their backs, and spirited pashas to appeal to, 
who would have known better than to give a hearing to a lot 
of diggers of the sand. 

She sighed for Asia, but she had no necromancer’s wand to 
transport Messina beyond the Dardanelles : so she turned her 
thoughts, /a de mieux, to London. 

Only to carry out her intentions it was absolutely necessary 
that she should go to London, and this at once, if her scheme 
■were to have any chance of prosperity. 

There is no place like London for finding the white of egg 
that will adhere and the paint that will stick on the glaze of 
financial pots that are broken. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


339 


Above all, beyond all, and most odious of all, loris must 
know nothing of it till the mended pot was successfully painted 
and sold. loris, on occasion, had odd, quixotic caprices, 
loris would almost certainly be for leaving the shreds of the 
pot untouched, whilst, as best he could, he would essay to save 
the sheep that were silly as the Gadarene swine. loris, if he 
knew her scheme, would inevitably, in one of his idiotic im- 
pulses, spoil all. 

This was what she had resolved as she had lain awake after 
her Carnival balls, restless, angry, and disturbed. 

She knew how to paint the pot, being conversant with all the 
ins and outs and technicalities of business, and having a passion 
for speculation, which was the one kindred sentiment that 
linked her and Mr. Challoner together in the one isolated 
harmony of their lives. 

She knew, or thought she knew, the kind of people to float 
it ; she knew, or thought she knew, the puppets needful to 
replace the Duke of Oban and the rest of the indispensable 
marionettes. She took her husband into her confidence, and 
he, otherwise willing that loris should be ruined, was very 
unwilling to cease to be a shepherd himself, and very cordially 
approved of all her intentions. 

“Do you think we can do it?” she said, this morning, as 
her “ idea” ploughed a slow way through the heavy earth of 
Mr. Challoner’s more stolid intelligence, backed with letters 
from trusty correspondents in various commercial dens and 
rows of figures drilled like Prussian regiments. 

Mr. Challoner gazed drearily and solemnly into vacancy, 
and laid the mass of papers on his knee that related to the 
mending of the broken pot. 

“ Yes, I think you can,” he said, with the cautious utter- 
rance of a man who never committed himself. “ Ye — es, I 
think you can : it promises ; but I suppose you see very well 
that it will necessitate your going to London.” 

Across his wife’s face fell a gloom deep as that of a moon- 
less night. 

“ Of course I know I must,” she said, sullenly, and with a 
stanch and heroical firmness. 

The obligation to go away lay on her soul like lead. It 
harassed her night and day. It haunted her like a bad dream, 
but she was resolved to brave everything, and go. Mended 


340 


FRIENDSHIP. 


and painted tlie pot must be, and nobody could do it but 
herself’. 

When inclination and interest pulled different ways, she was 
far too heroic a woman not to make inclination walk the plank 
and disappear. The Venusberg was all very well, but Capel 
Court and Cannon Street were better. Besides, her Venus- 
berg was safe enough : she would put a padlock on it, and 
leave her watch-dog on guard. 

She was quite of Lady Cardiff’s opinion, that Love was the 
bonbons and olives of the banquet of life ; Money was the 
soup and fish and the roti. Still, the necessity to go away 
harassed her soul as the steam plough harrows the wild High- 
land waste. 

It was absolutely necessary to go to London, and to go to 
London without him. She passed feverish days and sleepless 
nights, torn between desire and dread, — desire to go and make 
her projects realities, dread to leave him behind her near the 
woman she hated. 

If she did not go, she saw that Fiordelisa might be swamped 
with the piles in the sands by the sea, and loris without 
Fiordelisa would not have been half loris, nay, no loris 
at all, as he stood in her measure. Being forced to lose 
either loris or Fiordelisa, she would unhesitatingly have let 
loris go. Passion was strong with her, but never so strong 
as self-interest. The Dame du Comptoir outbalanced the 
Cleopatra. 

Nevertheless, the conflict of the two was tough and bitter, 
and rent her sorely as they wrestled. She began to grow worn, 
hectic, and haggard ; in these days of indecision she became 
nervous, restless, sullen, hysterical, by turns. loris was touched 
with remorse at what he thought was a carking anxiety for his 
welfare ; and Mr. Challoner, who for once was honored with 
being in her secret, thought it advisable to make a few visits 
all by himself in society with a sombre air, like a newly-made 
widower’s, and hint that decline had always been terribly fatal 
to her family ; his wife would over-excrt herself ; alas 1 yes, she 
would ; her energy was so great, and her physical strength not 
proportionate to it. 

“ A most devoted husband,” said Society, and thought he 
expressed himself very nicely. 

“ An excellent person ] most attached couple,” said General 


FRIENDSHIP. 


341 


Desart, standing on the club steps, whilst Mrs. Desart was at 
home having her eyebrows painted on her lovely brow by the 
Duke of Buonretiro. 


CHAPTER XXX. 

Lknt passed, and the weather grew warm ; in after-years 
when they looked back to the Lenten time it was beautiful 
and embalmed, as with the scent of buried blossoms and the 
sounds of music forever stilled, in the hearts of both loris and 
Etoile. 

It was the true and perfect springtide of the year, when 
Love walks among the flowers, and comes a step nearer what 
it seeks with every dawn. 

Without Love, spring is of all seasons cruel, — more cruel 
than all the frost and frown of winter. 

As this springtide grew, and with it grew the warmth, and 
the mountain-sides changed to a dewy greenness, and the 
plains were all a sea of grasses and of flowers, she moved from 
her old palace to a villa as old outside the gates, set in a grand 
old garden, and with the Anio running by its walls. loris 
found the place for her, persuaded her to rent it, charged him- 
self with facilitating the transport there of her bronzes, tapes- 
tries, and canvasses, and was glad that the copyist of the 
Aurora would no longer be able to spy upon him when he 
should pass up on to these old gray terraces. 

His mistress heard of this charge with anger ; it bewildered 
and annoyed her'; go away herself she fancied that she must; 
she would fain have had the woman in whom she was vaguely 
conscious of a rival, away also. 

“ Is it true that she has taken Rocaldi ?” she said sharply 
to loris. 

loris looked up. “ Who has taken Rocaldi ?” 

“ What affectation ! as if you didn’t know ! They say you 
took it for her ” 

“ Pardon me, I forgot. Yes, I believe she has taken it ; 
but it is no doing of mine : indeed, I told her it was not 
thought very healthy.” 


29 * 


342 


FRIENDSHIP. 


He looked so indifferent, and spoke so tranquilly, that his 
listener, as usual, was deceived. 

“Marjory was mistaken, and so was I; he does not care,” 
she thought to herself. Aloud she said, with a laugh, “ It is 
on the road to Fiordelisa. I suppose that counterbalances its 
unhealthiness. She is certainly bent on your subjugation, lo !” 

^^Machere! What folly !” 

He had passed all that morning in the old neglected gar- 
dens of Rocaldi with Etoile, and in the stately melancholy 
rooms, arranging her pictures, planning changes for her, di- 
recting workmen, listening to the birds that filled the ilex 
thickets and flew about the palms. 

But he was not afraid ; Etoile and she seldom met, and he 
had no longer to fear intimacy between them : moreover, he 
knew that Etoile never spoke of him : it would not be like her 
nature or her ways. 

“ Voiis Vavez voulu r he thought to himself, as he saw how 
completely his mistress was blinded; she had brought it on 
her own head ; she had kept him in a subserviency, and de- 
manded from him a surrender of his time and of his thoughts, 
which no man will give without being driven into the self- 
compensation of concealment. Time and thought, like all his 
other possessions, were signed and sealed away into her hands, 
but it was only human nature that he should rebel and take 
his own out of both time and thought unknown to her. His 
life had been pervaded by her like a room by the smell of 
camphor wood. Open the window, bring in flowers, burn 
pastilles, throw rose-water about, do what you will, there is 
the smell of the camphor wood still. To escape it you must 
go out to the fresh air. He had done so. 

The fault was hers. 

She had made passion into a police sergeant, and put love 
under lock and key. Passion betrayed and Love escaped 
her : it was only in the laws of human nature. 

But she did not know it. 

To loris, as to every Italian, mystery and silence were the 
very essence of Love’s life ; to steal away when the lark sings, 
is the joy of every lover since the days of Borneo. His mis- 
tress, who had called to all the crowing cocks at dawn to see 
him on her balcony, had thrown aside the sweetest spell of 
power. 


FRIENDSHIP. 343 

The lover in him was once more awake, and he deceived his 
jailer as the lover ever does. 

Meanwhile, Etoile remained unconscious of the labyrinth 
she entered, conscious only of the fatal paradise of an artist’s 
dreams. 

Etoile thought very little about the world at any time, and 
much of its evil was written in a dead tongue to her. 

Of course nobody would have believed that. Nevertheless 
so it was. 

A woman whose chief companionship has been that of wise 
men will keep an absolute honesty of mind, because she will 
have been in contact with honest minds that would not con- 
taminate her own. Women are the chief corrupters of women. 
Men, unless they are very bad (and there are not many that 
are so), in their intercourse with a woman whom they find 
without guile, will, when they speak of evil, bid her know 
it as the base nettle, which has no power to sting the bold 
and innocent hand that grasps to cast it forth. Women will 
smile and say the nettle is difficult to pluck, — oh, yes, no 
doubt, — but then there is a flower inside it ; only touch and 
see. 

Passions and sins had been revealed to her. She had seen 
the human pulses all laid bare by the anatomists of three thou- 
sand years of human culture. She had heard the thinker 
muse aloud, the cynic sneer, the poet sigh, over the conflict of 
the beast and of the god which, in its various shapes, is yet 
the same in all the human histories, be they under the law of 
Manu, or Vishnu, or Aphrodite, or Christ. 

She was not ignorant of evil, but innocent of it. 

As women of religion, with the red cross on their breasts, 
bend over the wide war wounds of naked men, so she beheld 
corruption, yet remained aloof from it ; knew it, and yet knew 
it not ; beheld and heard of it, yet was unsullied by it, as a 
child may walk clean through a lazaretto. 

The world hardly understands this difference. 

It cannot comprehend that the awakening of the intelligence 
and the sleep of the senses can long be co-existent. 

Shakspeare knew this truth. Goethe did not. Gretchen 
has no middle way betwixt a stupid ignorance and an abso- 
lute surrender. But Imogen knows well the perils of her 
path, but with clear eyes and with firm feet goes onward. 


344 


FRIENDSHIP. 


The women of Shakspeare are all innocent, with the noblest, 
fairest, truest faith and form of innocence, but they are not 
ignorant of evil. Of all the poets’ women they are the most 
perfect. But they know the woe of the world that is around 
them, and, when the hour comes, the passion. 

But if a living woman comes, who has like Imogen her 
drawn sword yet her child’s heart, the world will never believe 
in her. 

She will shake the rock of its disbelief as vainly as Desde- 
mona shook Othello’s. Faithful to one alone as Desdemona 
she may be, but like Desdemona she must die deemed to her 
latest breath a wanton. And when she lies dead they will say 
so still. For the world, not having Othello’s love, has not his 
penitence. 

“Aren’t you going away at all, then?” asked the Lady 
Joan sharply of Etoile, meeting her one day by chance in the 
Borghese woods during Holy Week. 

“ I think not,” she murmured, coldly. “ I have taken an 
old villa outside the gates : I go to remain there in a few 
days.” 

“ So lo told me. Bocaldi, isn’t it ? I am sure I am most 
charmed,” said Lady Joan, remembering herself. “ You must 
come to see us very often at Fiordelisa. We all go up to Fior- 
delisa in a week or so for the summer. Bocaldi lies on the 
way to Fiordelisa : I think lo said so.” 

Then coldly they bade each other good-day. 

“ Isn’t it indecent the way she lives?” said the Lady Joan, 
fiercely, as she passed onward. 

“ I don’t see any indecency,” said Mr. Challoner, looking 
about him as if it were a thing to be detected in the air. 

“ You never see an inch before your face,” said his wife. 
“ Of course I’ll never let her into Fiordelisa, if she stay here 
a hundred years, rude, insolent, ungrateful, abominable creature 
that she is !” 

“ What has she done, except fascinate loris ?” said Mr. 
Challoner, with a face of gloom, but an inward complacency. 

“ Fascinate a fiddlestick !” said his wife, with consummate 
scorn. “ As if I cared whatever fool he may make of him- 
self ! — besides, I know he can’t bear her ; she disgusts him ; 
he has said so fifty times ; he hates notorious women.” 

“You cannot properly call her notorious,” said Mr. Chal- 


FRIENDSHIP. 345 

loner, who loved nothing better than to pick at straws with his 

wife : “ the word notorious means ” 

“ I don’t want to be taught out of a dictionary by you,” said 
the Lady Joan. “ It’s enough for me that she refuses my 
invitations, and never even calls on me, except by leaving a 
card ; when you think all we did for her, all our kindness, all 
our hospitality, — a woman that really it is horrible to think 
has ever crossed our threshold, when one knows what she 
is ” 

“ It is inconsistent to be annoyed with her for crossing it 
no more, then,” said Mr. Challoner, who was in a contradictory 
and boorish humor, having come from a melancholy perusal 
of the reports of the Society. Italiana-Inglese. 

“ Oh, you and lo think her right, of course. You’d both 
see me insulted and trampled on, and never get out of your 

chairs 1 Your’re just like my father ” 

“ H-us-sh 1” said Mr. Challoner, who thought a scene would 
be inconvenient in the well-filled Borghese woods with the 
scarlet royal liveries passing. “ H-us-sh ! What does it mat- 
ter, one way or the other ? Nothing easier than to say we 
made a mistake in receiving her. My love, here is Lady Nor- 
wich. Dear Lady Norwich ” 

That night Etoile went to a reception at the Palazzo Far- 
nese, which was one of the many eminent houses that did not 
open its doors to the Lady Joan. The reception was given 
for the Emperor and Empress of Amazonia, high and catholic 
sovereigns, in their travels. It was now Easter, and Rome 
had still a fashionable foreign crowd at its command, though 
the crowd were on the eve of dispersion to Northern lands, to 
the glories of Marlborough House and the Orleans Club, to 
the grand stand of Chantilly and the pavillion of Trouville. 

PasquJi, though shorn of its pontifical splendors, still is 
Pasquii, in Rome ; and the fashionable crowd was waiting for 
its final functions, and enjoying a few last farewell-fStes mean- 
while. 

loris came late, very late : he had escaped from the Casa 
Challoner by the plea of a Prince’s command, which existed 
only in his imagination, and had left the Lady Joan sitting, 
sullen and worried, over cipher telegrams and arithmetic, smok- 
ing strong Turkish and drinking black coffee. 

He came into the beautiful gallery that has no rival in the 


346 


FRIENDSHIP, 


world, himself looking in unison with the place, pale, graceful, 
pensive, proud, giving a low bow here, a charming greeting 
there, grand seigneur in every gesture, as all his forefathers 
had been before him. 

He made his slow, courteous way through the august crowd, 
where nearly every one was an acquaintance, and by degrees‘ 
without apparent desire or design, approached a woman in a 
cream-hued dress, made like the gowns of the Marie de 
Medicis portraits, with pale-yellow roses and japonica, and 
diamonds at her bosom and about her throat. It was Etoile : 
she was talking with two foreign ministers and Princess 
Vera. 

He saw her glance wander towards him, her color change, 
her breath come quicker ; though he could not hear her words, 
he felt sure that they lost their lucidity and eloquence and 
grew absent and ill connected. He smiled and murmured to 
himself once more, — 

Je vois bien que tu m’aimes : 

Tu rougis quand je te regarde.” 

Then he joined her, and spoke with her and the two minis- 
ters on the topic of the hour. 

As his eyes dwelt caressingly on the long, straight folds of 
the creamy dress and its old filmy laces, he thought with a 
shudder of the strong hand that had just grasped his in the 
Casa Challoner, and the stern lips gripping their cigarette. 

After a while, without observation, he drew her away alone ; 
he was a master in the little arts of society ; and the Palazzo 
Farnese is so vast that five hundred people in its mighty cham- 
bers look no more than a handful of leaves on a lake. 

“ I want to ask you something, if you will not be too harsh 
to me,” he murmured, his eyes resting tenderly on the yellow 
roses that moved with her breath. 

“ Am I likely to be harsh ? Ask.” ^ » 

“ You never go to her now,” he said, in a low tone.' 

“ No. You know very well why ; ” 

He hesitated, then said, with that sort of timidity which in 
him was a caressing and supplementary gracefulness, — 

“ Perhaps if you would go now and then, it might be 
better.” 

“ Why?” 


FRIENDSHIP. 347 

“ Alas ! you know her temper, her vehemence, her fancies : if 
she thinks herself slighted she may take some vengeance ” 

“ On you !” said Etoile, with a glance of vague alarm. 

“ Ah, no 1 On you !” 

“ On me !” she echoed, with an inflection of absolute indif- 
ference and scorn. “ What can any woman do to me, or man 
either ? What idle fears ! Are you not ashamed to give 
them any shape in words ?” 

“ Alas 1” said loris, with a sigh, and paused ; he thought of 
the base calumnies that his mistress sent forth as serpents dart 
their tongues, but he shrank from speaking of them. “ I 
understand that intimacy between you is impossible,” he mur- 
mured ; “ but the mere empty courtesies of society, the mere 
forms of friendship, might be more wisely kept up : if you would 
dine there again, call oftener ” 

“I will not.” 

Etoile turned suddenly, and her eyes burned for a moment 
into his with an anger that filled him with admiration, because 
it was so righteous and so frank. 

“ When I came to her I did not know what she was. Now 
I know. I have become your friend, — more than your friend ; 
I have your confidence. Perhaps you are wrong to give it ; 
perhaps I am wrong to receive it ; perhaps — but so it is. We 
cannot unsay all that we have said. If she come to me I 
will receive her, through respect for her father, receive her 
with all courtesy, but I will not go into her house again, — 
never, never 1 I will not affect to her to hold her in esteem 
while in my heart I hold her infamous ! I will not 1 My friend- 
ship has never been the empty falsehood of Society ; it has 
never been the secret sneer of conventionality covered with a 
conventional caress ; it shall not be so to her. Could I palm 
off the lie on her, I should merit any He that she might tell 
of me!” 

She spoke with force and with emotion ; her own inmost 
sense of her antagonism to this woman made her strive the 
more to be loyal to her, made her cling the closer to sincerity 
in her dealings with her. 

“ You are superb, but you are not of this world,” he said, 
and kissed her hands with tender wondering eyes. 

“ I try to be just,” said Etoile, wearily. A sense of con- 
straint and concealment began to weigh upon her. 


348 


FRIENDSHIP. 


loris sighed. 

This truthfulness was beautiful to him, because it was so 
strange, so utterly unlike all that he had ever known in 
the women who had influenced his life, but it embarrassed 
him. 

He felt — and hated himself for so feeling — that women were 
easier to deal with who had those instincts of intrigue, those 
proficiencies in deception, which he had been wont to think 
inborn in all womanhood. 

“ Justice is very difficult and very rare,” he said, with 
hesitation. 

“ Yes, more difficult, more rare, than mercy. But one must 
be just, even to an enemy, or be base.” 

She paused abruptly, and colored, remembering all that it 
implied to acknowledge his mistress as her foe. 

He smiled, well pleased, though troubled. 

“ You are half a warrior, half a child, and all a muse,” he 
said, tenderly. “ But you are not made for our base and 
banal world.” 

“ You have women enough around you that are. Go to 
them. Will you not?” 

She smiled a little as she spoke. 

“ No.” 

“ Then do not complain of me.” 

“ Do I complain ?” 

Their voices were very low, there was no one near them ; 
the great room was full of the scent of roses ; above-head were 
the gorgeous yet tender hues of frescoes. 

Her eyes fell beneath his. 

“ Why will you talk to me of her?” she said, irrelevantly, 
with pain and with impatience in her voice. “ It is to be 
false to both her and me. You must know that.” 

“ I could never be false to ^ow,” he murmured, and, as they 
stood together, stooped till his breath was on her brow and his 
cheek touched hers. 

She grew very pale ; he watched the quick, high beating 
of her heart. 

“ You are not free to speak so.” 

“ I will be free.” 

They were both silent ; beyond the doors there were some 
movement and subdued murmur of voices. They were no 


FRIENDSHIP. 349 

longer alone with the roses ; the world, that is the enemy of 
passion, was about them. 

The great empress for whom this Pasquh, fete was given, 
and who was an amiable old lady in a knitted shawl, and her 
husband, who was driving the host almost to madness by re- 
quiring the date and history of every morsel of sculpture and 
of fresco on the walls and ceilings, were both approaching, 
with a polite little throng of decorated personages about them. 

They wished to see Etoile. She went to be presented to 
them. 

“ Dreadful bore !” murmured Lady Cardiff to her as she 
went. “ However, my dear, you are strong in dates and docu- 
ments, so perhaps it will not plague you so much as it does 
his poor Excellency yonder. They should not educate Koyal- 
ties and Imperialities : they are very much nicer when they 
can only say how- do.” 

loris, seeing Lady Cardiff’s eyes on him, bent down with 
ardent devotion to a beautiful countrywoman of his own, the 
Duchess of Ara Coeli. 

“ I wonder if he is entangling Etoile or disentangling him- 
self,” thought Lady Cardiff, following him with her glance. 
“ There will be a very great difference. Whichever way he 
begins, he will end. I wish I knew him well enough to talk 
to him : not that one ever does any good in these things : they 
always have their course like comets, and no one can change 
it by screaming. But I am afraid ; yes, I am afraid. He 
will not be bully enough to get rid of that bully of his. It 
is an odd thing that men are always over-brutal or over-gentle. 
I wish Lady Joan had caught a Sir John Brute. loris has 
not enough of the brute. As for Aer, if she do care for him, 
he ought to be Petrarch and Mirabeau blended. Our sort of 
love will never do for her. Our love is like the moccoletti : 
the fun consists in setting fire to as many tapers and blowing 
out as many as ever we can. The passions of the world are 
only tapers, dipped in petroleum sometimes indeed, but never 
either the sun or the stars that she dreams of. Don’t you 
think so, loris ?” she asked, suddenly, aloud. 

‘‘ said loris, leaving his duchess. 

Lady Cardiff looked at him through her eyeglass. 

“ I was thinking aloud ; a bad habit ; I was thinking not 
one man in a million can love a woman like Mirabeau ; and 

80 


350 


FRIENDSHIP. 


not one in ten millions like Petrarch. Now, women like our 
feminine Raflfaelle yonder want Mirabeaus and Petrarchs, who 
are not to be found. Failing the suns and the stars, do you 
think such a woman should be satisfied with the light of a 
taper ?” 

He looked annoyed. 

“ I presume she would be the best judge of the light that 
would content her 1” he said, coldly ; “ but I should imagine, 
madame, that she was quite above the need of any light except 
her own.” 

Lady Cardiff smiled. 

“ I am very glad to hear you say so ; you see a good deal 
of her, I believe, and can tell one. Of course, genius is like 
the nautilus, all sufficient for itself in its pretty shell, quite at 
home in the big ocean, with no fear from any storm. But if 
a wanton stone from a boat passing by breaks the shell, where 
is the nautilus then ? Drowned ; just like any common crea- 
ture ! Oh, dear, no ! I was not thinking of anything in es- 
pecial. Do tell me who that new woman is in the black and 
red, with the huge pearls ; never saw her before ; — a Rouma- 
nian princess ? Ah ! they are all princesses in Roumania.” 

Then Lady Cardiff released him ; but he did not return to 
the duchess. 

‘‘ Drowned ; just like any common creature 1” 

The words rung in his ears and haunted him. He knew 
the truth that their figure conveyed. The nautilus-shell had 
ridden on the sea of the world safe and buoyant through the 
winds of fame and the storm of envy. Was his the hand 
that should cast the stone from the passing boat and make 
that fairy voyage end in wreck and in disaster ? Forbid it 
Heaven 1 

He was a man thoughtful by nature, though by deliberate 
choice he often would not think. To the dangers of the course 
he was pursuing he was wilfully blind, because he did not 
choose to pause and look close into its peril ; but these words 
shook him to a fuller, franker sense of the thing that he was 
doing. He was not Petrarch, he was not Mirabeau ; but he 
was the man she loved, and so the maker of her fate, — the 
light that would shed eternal summer about her, or the stone 
that would sink her in the storm. 

He went slowly through the brilliant throngs, with the Car- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


351 


raccio and the Raphael frescoes above his head, and the cour- 
teous smile and empty phrase of society upon his lips ; but he 
saw very little of what was around him ; he saw only the 
creamy hues of a far-ofif dress, the shining of some diamonds 
among yellow flowers, a wistful glance now and then from 
eyes that, unconscious of what they did, followed and sought 
him. 

“ Drowned ; just like any common creature 1” 

Yes ! if he chose. 

His pulse beat high, his cheek grew warm ; he was victori- 
ous, yet uneasy in his victory. 

People began to go away: the imperial guests had gone, 
and others were free to go. 

He went out and waited on the great stairs until the time 
* that he saw her pass by. An old man, a minister, was con- 
ducting her to her carriage. 

loris drew back with a deep bow, and let her pass on down 
into the halls below and the gardens that were illumined to 
the edge of the Tiber. The great courts of Farnese were full 
of flickering torches, trampling horses, gilded lackeys; the 
lamps of many colors twinkled under the sombre arcades. 
Such scenes are commonplace elsewhere, and pall by repetition, 
but in Rome they are always majestic because the past is 
always in them : through these gardens Borgia had passed, 
through these arcades Rafiaelle had roamed. 

loris threw his furs about him, and went down into the 
torch-glare and the press of men and horses. Above the 
garden the moon was hanging; music came from the open 
casements on the air. 

A carriage was passing slowly outward into the Campo dei 
Fieri. 

At a sign from him his own followed it. 

When she descended at her door, he was there in the clear 
moonlight. 

“ Did you think I could bear not to say good-night ?” he 
murmured, and he wrapped her cashmeres closer around her 
very gently, and led her up the darkened staircase under the 
pallid sad frescoes of Overbeck. 

In the great rooms the lamps were burning, the Are was 
low on the hearth, the flowers were spreading their sweetness 
on vacancy. 


352 


FRIENDSHIP. 


He took the cashmeres from about her, and his arms en- 
closed her instead. 

“ You love me, I love you,” he said, softly. “ Make me 
what you think me ; what you wish me : I am yours !” 


CHAPTER XXXI. 

Some persons passing at that moment down the stairs and 
corridors of the Farnese were saying to each other, “ What 
absurdity to suppose that there was anything between loris 
and Etoile ! Did you not see him ! how coldly he bowed. 
He seems hardly to know anything of her. Why will people 
talk nonsense ? Besides, you know very well he is entirely 
accapar6 by that Englishwoman ; oh, yes.” 

Lady Cardiff, as she overheard the remark as she also passed 
down the staircase, smiled to herself. It was the sort of thing 
that interested her, — to watch the drama passing on the stage, 
and hear the comments of the audience on it at the same 
time. 

“ What a fine mouche he is !” she thought. “ Well, I will 
keep their secret, though they don’t choose to trust me with 
it. But a day’s secrecy here will be an error with his bully : 
he should be fierce, firm, and frank, — but he won’t be, not he. 
I wish he were Petrarch or Mirabeau. My poor nautilus ! 
— how long will he leave you serene in your shell, and how 
much will he understand the harm he does when he breaks 
it?” 

And she went home, and for once had no pleasure in reading 
her “ Figaro” in bed. 

“ That’s what comes of being interested in a creature that 
feels things: it is catching, like diphtheria,” she thought 
angrily to herself, as she read a column of Villemessant twice 
over without caring about it; and decided to take a little 
chloral. 

“ He won’t even know how soon the shell will break : that 
will be the worst of it,” she thought, as she poured out the 
drops. “ He has lived so long with a woman as hard as* a 
cocoanut.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


353 


The woman who was hard as a cocoanut was at that hour, 
as the carriages sped through the moonlit midnight from the 
courts of Farnese, — rolling through Kome with a dull thunder 
that reached her ear and made her angry, because to Farnese 
she went not herself, — sitting alone before her writing-table, 
smoking, sorting her papers and telegrams, and issuing com- 
mands to her sleepy, worn-out waiting-woman. 

“ Have you everything packed for Fiordelisa ?” she was 
saying, in conclusion. “ The oxen will be in here early for 
the boxes ; mind that you are ready, that is all ; and tell the 
cook to go up there by sunrise, as soon as he’s been to market, 
because I shall have some people up to luncheon, and he must 
have a good many things cold and savory ; see you tell him ; 
and let these letters be posted, and give me my bath by eight 
o’clock, and send somebody round early to the Prince loris 
to tell him to be here by ten o'clock, — not a second later ; 
and that’s all, I think. I’ll wear my linsey-woolsey gown 
to-morrow, and I come back to go to the opera, you know, at 
night, and you will get out my amber dress and the emeralds 
for that.” 

And she went to her couch and slept in peace, though the 
carriages were still rolling by from Farnese. 

In the morning her messenger brought her a pencilled note 
back ; loris regretted, — apologized, — but he was in his room, 
and could not rise : he had one of his bad headaches. He 
would endeavor to join her later. 

On any other day she would have darted down to his house 
and made his head ache ten times more severe with her fuss 
and her remedies and her noise, but that day she was busy, she 
could only send Mr. Challoner. Against Mr. Challoner, loris 
kept his chamber-door barred, and sent out word that he was 
really unwell. She heard, hesitated : should she go herself? — 
then reflected that he so often had headaches, especially now, 
and she was overwhelmed with business, and she had prom- 
ised to drive out Douglas Graeme and Guido Serravalle, and a 
Lady Blank was to go up and lunch at Fiordelisa of whom 
there were great hopes in regard to the purchase of a huge 
oaken altar-screen discovered by Mimo. 

She was sorry that he had his headache, because in her 
rough way she cared for him, but perhaps it was not alto- 
gether unfortunate : the Lady Blank, who was to buy the 

30 * 


354 


FRIENDSHIP. 


altar-screen, was a person of prudish and peculiar notions, and 
there was coming up with her an English Consul, who was a 
family man, and would bring his young daughters to play lawn- 
tennis, — a bore certainly, but useful when any Lady Blanks 
were there. Lady Joan regarded the Consul with boundless 
contempt, as the very poorest limpest threadpaper of a man, 
but the threadpaper was noted for strong domestic principles 
and sentiments, and, as he played lawn-tennis with his little 
girls on the grass of Fiordelisa, was a useful pawn on her 
social chess-board. “ Dear Mr. Dunallan takes his children 

there, and he never would, you know, if ” said t3ie small 

gentilities of whom he was chief, whenever the small gentili- 
ties had qualms. 

When the ponies came to the door and the oxen came to 
bear these household gods of the Casa Challoner, which it 
was then wont to carry with them, like the ancient Latins, she 
made up her mind and took her departure for Fiordelisa. 

She was in love with loris, but the apple of her eye, the 
jewel of her treasures, the idol of her heart, was Fiordelisa. 

Besides, she could not lose the chance of selling the altar- 
screen. 

So she slashed the ponies and started off, Douglas Graeme 
beside her, her guitar and her gun at her feet, the oxen labor- 
ing far behind under the weight of the household gods. 

To move something looked respectable, and like ownership 
of the old gray castle on the hill. Besides, some of the house- 
hold gods were always for sale, — a use to which the ancient 
Latins did not put them. 

“ Is she gone, Giannino ?” asked loris of his servant, who 
had been sent for to be useful for the packing of the goods. 
“ Yes, Excellence,” said the man, and added, under his breath, 
“ the saints be praised !” 

“ You may open the blinds,” said loris, who was lying on 
the outside of his bed, and he rose at once. 

There was a knot of yellow roses and jessamine in a glass 
by his bed : they were crushed and faded flowers, but he put 
them to his lips, and the sweetness of the most triumphant 
hour of his life seemed in them. 

He was very happy, yet he knew himself in great peril. 

The one consciousness heightened the other. 

He passed the morning at Bocaldi with Etoile. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


355 


She was not yet living there, but often passed the days in 
the great, lonely, balmy garden. 

The terraces were moss-grown now, the statues mutilated 
and fallen, the ivy and pimpernel ran in their innocent riot 
over the unweeded walks, but it was beautiful ; walls of thick 
ilex darkness enclosed it, and here and there tall palms soared 
up from a wilderness of roses. The cool and lovely summer 
that comes with April was like a caress upon the land ; under 
all the fresh foliage birds sang, and above-head was a cloudless 
sky. 

“Ah, how I wonder that I could ever live without ” 

Etoile sighed amidst it all as only the happy sigh, and left 
the phrase unended. 

loris, sitting at her feet on the marble steps of the terrace, 
smiled, and kissed the hands he held. 

“ The nautilus sails no more by itself,” he thought, and 
aloud he said, “ You were but a muse before ; now you are a 
woman. I have called you down to earth.” 

“ Is it earth ?” she said, dreamily. “ Hardly ” 

To her it seemed something diviner far. 

But with him love was of earth, and did not lift its wings. 

Had he seen her first, 

She might have made this and that other world another world 

For the sick man, but now 

The shackles of an old love straitened him;" 

and the baneful influence of long years of bondage was like a 
sickness in him, body and soul. He was passionately proud 
of the new power he had gained, of the new bonds that he in 
turn had woven, of the strength he had found to usurp do- 
minion over a mind by others untamable and beyond human 
reach. 

But triumph and passion are far off the love of which 
Etoile dreamed, as Elaine dreamt before the Shield. These 
subtle fires that enclosed her in their warmth and devouring 
speed are fires that burn up the soul and then die do\t'n. 

But of this she was ignorant ; she only knew that all exist- 
ence was transfigured for her, that her past seemed pale and 
poor as a starved flower on a barren moor ; and only now — 
now, when his hands touched her and his eyes gazed at her, 
did she awake and live. 


356 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ It is terrible,” she said, and grew pale, and was afraid of 
these new joys that seemed like gods to rule and to destroy. 

He only smiled with victorious consciousness. “ Your 
dreams were the enemies of men. I have made them my 
prisoners. They will never wander from me now.” 

“ It is that which is terrible,” she said, under her breatn, 
with a vague and sudden sense of that irremediable loss which 
Love calls gain. 

Some dread, like Merlin’s dread, passed over her like a chill 
wind. 

“ If I fear 

Giving you power upon me through the charm 
That you might play me falsely, having power. 

However well you think you love mo now 
fAs sons of kings, loving in pupilage. 

Have turn’d to tyrants when they came to power), 

I rather dread the loss of use than fame.” 

But to him this dread in her was sweetest flattery, supremest 
attestation of his empire that made him glad with a boy’s 
gladness, proud with a despot’s pride. loris only smiled and 
kissed her closed eyelids with his silent lips. 

And once more she was blind, — and happy. 

The lovely day burned itself out in fire, color like the flush 
of the rose laurel flowers spreading itself over the western 
lieavens. 

They had been happy. 

By common tacit consent they had never spoken of the one 
who was now the enemy of both. 

She loomed in the darkness of their future like a tempest- 
cloud that darkens the fair sky with menace, sure to be ful- 
filled ; but neither remembered her, or, if her memory passed 
over them, would dwell on it. To the woman it seemed so 
easy for him to close the doors of the grave on the old ashes 
of a dead shame, and come forth from it into the bright air of 
untainted joys, that she thought it outrage to him to speak of 
such a thing as duty ; to him the efibrt seemed so difficult 
that he would not face its obligation till the sheer hour of 
need should strike. 

To her he had said, “ I will be free.” She would have thought 
it insult to doubt his word or urge on its fulfilment. To him 
its fulfilment looked so hard and hazardous that he drove it 


FRIENDSHIP. 357 

from his memory until such time as he should be forced to 
rise and grapple with the spectre. 

To her it seemed simple as the growth of a field-lily, that 
he should rise from unworthiness and be free; to him it 
seemed perilous as seizure of an asp, to divorce himself from 
the snake-like folds of a guilty tie. 

So the hours passed, and her name was unspoken between 
them. 

To her it seemed shameful, to him it seemed loathsome, to 
utter it. 

At sunset he took his leave of her. She did not ask him 
whither he went. 

They loved each other ; that seemed to Etoile to shut out 
forever from them the baseness of suspicion, the unworthiness 
of doubt. 

But at the last moment, when his cheek was against hers 
in his farewell, she murmured to him, — 

“ You will tell her the truth — now?” 

» Yes.” 

He murmured back the word on her lips. 

He went, and left her to the dreams that henceforth were his 
captives, her hands lightly clasped behind her head, her eyes 
closed, her lips parted in a soft slight smile : nothing any 
more, but only the woman that he loved, the woman that 
loved him, and gladder, prouder to be that, than of all fame, 
or use, or praise, or place on earth. 

He went, and his reluctant steps and his hesitating will 
bore him to where all the manhood in him rebelled against 
and forswore ; bore him to the lamplight, the laughter, the 
smoke, and the quarrels of the Turkish chamber. 

He felt a coward and untrue, but habit is stronger than 
conscience ; he said to himself, “ To-morrow, not to-night.” 

He recoiled from seizing the asp and fiinging it from him, 
yet he submitted under the sense of its tightening folds. 

“ You do not look ill now,” said his tyrant, sharply, standing 
under the light in yellow shining raiment, with glittering eyes, 
fierce and curious and menacing. “ You do not look ill now. 
What has kept you away? You are coming to the opera?” 

“ I am not well ; but I will come.” 

He grew very pale ; he seemed to suffer. She bent her 
jealous eyes on him. 


358 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Are you ill ? I believe there is nothing the matter with 
you except indolence. We had a splendid day. I have sold 
the screen ; everything is gone up ; we can go to stay to- 
morrow. You do look pale. Take some wine; no? Poor 
lo ! You are feverish.” 

She brushed the hair off his forehead and leaned her hand 
on it : he shuddered under the touch. 

“ There is your husband,” he muttered, impatiently, and 
moved away. She stared at him : she thought he must be 
feverish indeed, to be afraid of her lord’s presence. 

Other men entered to accompany her to the opera. 

It was a great night by royal command. The house was 
brilliant ; the soldier-king sat with his hands resting on the 
hilt of his sword ; the opera was “ Comte Ory never again 
did loris hear the graceful melodies of it without a shudder of 
hateful recollection. 

His mistress looked well ; her amber skirts swept his feet, 
thick gold chains were twisted around her shapely head : she 
had a great fan of ostrich feathers ; she laughed and was gay ; 
he sat in the chair behind her and seldom spoke. 

Turning her head to him, she thought that it was true 
he was not well ; he had fever, his face was so flushed, and 
his eyes had so strange a look. 

“ May I leave you ?” he asked her, early in the hateful 
night. “ May I leave you ? You have others with you, and 
indeed I am ill, — at least too ill to bear this music and this 
glare.” 

She pitied him for once, believed, and let him go. 

He returned to Etoile, to the cool shadowy flower-filled 
chamber on the Montecavallo, with its windows open to the 
Rospigliosi gardens, to the song of the nightingales, and the 
shine of the stars. 

“ Have you told her ?” she asked him. , 

“ I could not to-night,” he answered. “ She is gone to the 
.opera. Do not let us talk of her. I want peace. I have 
been without it so long. Give it me 1” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


359 


CHAPTER XXXII. 

On the morrow loris said to himself, “ I must tell her now.” 
And his courage quailed even as quailed Launcelot’s before 
the Queen, knowing that “ at a wink the false love leaps to 
hate.” 

And he was not armed even as Launcelot was, with a crown 
diamond, to pave the way to freedom. 

He knew his tyrant well enough to know that liberty she 
would have sold, — at a high price ; but he had not such pur- 
chase-money. All his riches, such as they were, were whirl- 
ing already in the maelstrom of her speculations or sunk in 
the sands by the Sirens’ sea. 

He awoke with a heavy heart, even though his pulse beat 
high with fresh and unworn joys. There was a conflict to go 
through that he dreaded : it had been easier to stand stripped 
to his shirt, with the bare sword in his hand, in the dawn that 
saw a duel in his student days. Moreover, he scarcely wished 
to unveil this sweet secrecy, this love unguessed of the world, 
and carry it out into the broad day that had no shadows. He 
was so weary of publicity, of bondage, of thraldom, that all 
the world could laugh at as street crowds can jeer a galley-slave 
working with his gang on public roads ; it was delightful to him 
once more to know a passion that was shut in between his own 
heart and one other’s, like a culled flower between the closed 
pages of a poem. 

When the public voice proclaims it, love has lost half its 
mystic charm. Never to the lover is the hour of love so fair 
as when it is stolen from the rest of the covetous day, and 
the gentle theft is hidden from the world. Troubled and 
feverish he was ; but it is this trouble and this fever that are 
youth. 

For a few days he was ill enough to make it natural that 
he should let the transit to Fiordelisa be made without him ; 
ill enough to withdraw himself with the petulance of indis- 
position from his mistress’s presence ; well enough to rise as 
the cool twilight came, and take his way to the quiet chambers 


360 


FRIENDSHIP. 


of Etoile. Once or twice he was corapelled to go to Fiordelisa. 
He felt a traitor and false, — not to the woman who reigned at 
Fiordelisa, but to Etoile, to whom he did not confess that he 
went thither ; to Etoile, to whom he said, “ She is in the 
country : do not let us speak of her.” 

The position was full of peril, but it was a peril that was 
sweet, — as sweet as it was to Komeo to gaze up into the moonlit 
balcony, knowing that naked swords might be unsheathed and 
waiting for him among the white garden lilies. 

Etoile did not dream of any peril. 

He loved her : it seemed to her as natural as for the day to 
dawn that he should put from about him the foul bonds of an 
unlovely and loveless tyranny. The days went by, to her 
beautiful as a child’s fancy of Hesperides. She never ques- 
tioned him. She never doubted him. Since he loved her, it 
seemed to her that all the threads of those coarse and roughly- 
woven meshes, twisted round his life, must fall asunder and 
drop away at a touch, like the frail gross things they were. 
To doubt his power to put them from about him now, would 
have seemed to her like doubting his honor itself, like doubt- 
ing the very manhood in him. She asked him nothing be- 
cause she feared nothing. He was the maker and master 
of both their fates. “ Since he loves me” — she would think, 
with a smile ; and think that all was said, and made sure, in 
that. 

It was one of those erroi*s, simple, yet sublime, which cost 
far more than many a crime. 

Once she said to him, with a thrill of pain and of aver- 
sion, — 

“ Must she be there in your house all the summer ?” And 
he answered her, — 

“ What matter, love, since I am not there ?” 

He had come from Fiordelisa that day and had prom- 
ised to return there ; but he meant honestly to go thither no 
more after that one evening. He said to himself every day, 
“ To-morrow I will tell the truth,” and every day faded and 
died with the truth untold. Had Etoile been more mis- 
trustful of him, it might have been better for him ; it would 
have been less easy to deceive her, less temptation to con- 
tinue in the perilous path of secrecy. As it was, he closed 
her eyes and kissed their shut lids, and knew well that they 


FRIENDSHIP. 


361 


would not open unless he bade them. She lived in her 
dreams ; and her dreams, as he had said, were his captives. 

One day she awoke from her dreams for a moment, and 
looked at him with eyes whose tenderness seemed to him to 
hold all heaven in their gaze, and said to him in a low tone, 
“ Let her stay in the house if you must, — ^your dead mother’s 
house ! — ^but tell her of this, tell her all the truth at once. It 
is but just to her.” 

“ I will.” He kissed her as he promised. 

She shivered a little as with a sudden chill. “ Tell her, 
so that I may never see her again near you : it would hurt 
me ; I feel as if it would kill me ; now.” 

loris promised her once again, and meant what he vowed. 
“ They will meet in the world ; they will be friends a few 
years hence,” he thought ; “or at least any other women 
would but these.” 

His heart misgave him ; his task was harder than he strove 
to think it. He was used to the banal and brief passions of 
society ; the ties so close one hour, so loose the next ; the 
prudent shallow hatreds that kissed and jested, the fleet emo- 
tions that seethed like boiling froth, and evaporated in mere 
vapor ; the poor base trumpery evanescent thing that women 
of the world call love. These were what he had seen, and 
what he had known, but a chill passed over him as he felt that 
it was not with such as those that he had now to deal ; that 
on one side of him was a passion cruel as death, and on the 
other side a love high as the angels : that of the women who 
claimed his life now, one was too fierce, the other too frank, 
for either ever to drift away into the indifference that is the 
world’s form of forgiveness, ever to look into the other’s face 
and smile because Society was watching. 

He left her and drove across the plain in the radiant after- 
noon colors warm on the clusters of cistus and the plains of 
grass ; the April light was lovely about his path, and in the 
thickets by the mill-streams the thrushes and finches were 
singing, and the white butterflies were afloat like leaves of 
white roses scattered on the wind. 

He drove slowly through all the loveliness and lustre of the 
fast-declining day ; he dreaded the place whither he went, the 
voice that would there smite on his ear. He was happy with 
a sweet sense of youth, of triumph, of sympathy, of hope, that 
Q 31 


362 


FRIENDSHIP. 


had long been a stranger tx) liis breast ; but he was ill at ease, 
and his pulse beat with a dull apprehension. 

This woman to whom he was faithless was not a woman to 
forgive. 

The sun had set when he reached Fiordelisa, but day still 
lingered, golden, yet shadowy. With a strange sense of 
loathing he threw the reins to his servant, and approached the 
house by a side-path that led by an old arched door into the 
cortile. 

He heard the tinkle of cups, the uproar of laughter, the 
sounds of the mandolin, and the voice of his mistress singing 
one of the popular songs ; 

ogni fenestra vo’ tendere un lacio 
A tradimento per tradir la luna, 

A tradimento per tradir le stelle, 

A tradimento per tradir il sole, 

Perche restai tradito dall’ Amore !” 

Tradito ! — his blood ran cold, as if a dagger touched him. 
What would her vengeance be when she knew herself betrayed, 
befooled, forsaken ? He had felt a bare blade in a duel, and 
faced a rain of bullets in a battle with as much calmness as 
other men ; he had carried the dead, and watched by the sick, 
in the great cholera of Rome with tranquil and dauntless devo- 
tion ; but the bravest man on earth will quail before a woman 
that he fears. 

loris as he stood a moment by the old gray door, before un- 
latching it, felt a sickly sense at once of fear and of loathing, 
as the fierce imperious singing thrilled through his nerves. 
When he should tell her that she must arise and depart and 
let another reign there, how would it be ? 

Through a grating in the door he saw the court ; the tea- 
table, the lounging-chairs, the rugs and skins, the hanging 
creepers ; he saw Mr. Challoner dozing, the child playing with 
a colored balloon, the servants moving with a tray, Burletta 
and Serravalle smoking, Douglas Graeme making tea, and on 
a couch that was covered with a tiger-skin, the Lady Joan 
singing her song of treason, and striking the cords of her 
mandolin. 

With a horrible blankness and suddenness, the full realiza- 
tion fell on him how utterly she believed herself to be 
mistress there until the grave should take her ! 


FRIENDSHIP. 


363 


With a shock he himself realized how bitter as death, and 
inexorable as hatred, are those unholy unions which are 
blasphemy of marriage and a parody of love, yet are passed 
olf on a world that is willing to be duped — as friendship. 

He opened the door with the reckless gesture of a man who 
goes straight on a drawn sword : he was sick of his bonds, 
indifferent to his danger, braced to the conflict, ready for the 
worst : the hour of fate and of freedom had struck. 

Lady Joan, as the door unclosed, stopped in her song, and 
loosened her hold of her mandolin. “ lo ! How late you 
are ! I have some sad news for you. Come here !” 

He went reluctant ; he stood by her with a look on his face 
new there : she was not alone ; he could say nothing. The 
hour had passed : his courage had sunk. 

“ Grandmother is very ill,” said the Lady Joan. “ I have 
got to go to England. How you look !” 

“ It is sudden,” said loris, and his voice shook a little : his 
heart leaped with a great relief and a great joy ; she thought 
the emotion was sorrow and despair. 

“ Awfully sudden,” she said, as her hand closed on his. 
which was cold and unresponsive. “ I had the telegi’am this 
afternoon. They -fear she cannot live.” 

It was true : she had had the telegram, and it had arrived 
opportunely to give her a reason for that journey which was 
so inevitable and imperative in the pursuit of her idea. 

Burletta, who knew that the real cause of the journey was 
that the poor pot was going to be mended and painted, sat and 
smoked with the obese gravity of a fat pasha. “ What a great 
creature she is !” he thought ; “ always a good little lie ready, 
smooth as an egg, round as an apple.” 

He did not himself believe any more in the telegram than 
he had done in the Parmeggianino, but there he wronged her. 
She had really had it, favored by fortune, as fortune always 
favors the bold. 

“ Such a sad thing !” said Douglas Graeme over the teapot. 
“ Such a bore, too, just as we were all so tremendously jolly 
up here ! Poor old Lady Archiestoune. Why couldn’t she 
go off before ? She must be really quite antediluvian !” 

Mr. Challoner, waking from his slumbers, shook his head. 

Ninety years of a most admirable life now going to its 
long rest !” he said, with a tinge of poetry in his feelings and 


364 


FRIENDSHIP. 


his tone. “ The train leaves at 7.45, I think. Joan, always 
impetuous, wished to start to-night; but it is impossible to 
pack.” 

loris all the while stood silent. 

Lady Joan got out of her tiger-skin couch, and gaVe her 
little girl a box on the ear. 

“ You heartless little thing ! How dare you play with that 
bladder, when poor old great-grannie is dying, and you will 
never be able to see her any more?” 

“ You were singing, mamma,” murmured the child. “ You 
were singing. I did not know ” 

“ Come here, my darling ; never mind mamma,” said Mr. 
Challoner, from his rocking-chair. 

Lady Joan, with a glance and a gesture that loris knew and 
was in the habit of obeying, flung herself out of the iron gate 
which led to the old grassy pleasaunce beyond the court, where 
the peacocks were strutting under the boughs. 

“ How odd you look, lo !” she muttered, as he followed her. 
“ What is the matter with you ?” 

The truth sprang to his lips. 

Had it been spoken, all his future would have been freed, 
and have risen to a brighter and a purer light, as the loosed 
lark rises to the sun. But the cruel mischances that mock 
men were at work in that rosy evening air. 

As he hesitated, and kept silence, Douglas Graeme came 
through the open gate after them, throwing cake to the pea- 
cocks. 

“ What will all your beasts and your birds do without you, 
Joan?” he said, in the easy familiarity of their cousinship 
seventy-seven times removed. 

“ lo will be here to take care of them,” said the Lady 
Joan, tartly, annoyed to be followed when she wished to be 
alone. 

“ Do you mean you are going without lo ?” cried Douglas 
Graeme, saucily. “ I should have as soon dreamt of your 
going w’ithout — your husband !” 

“ Don’t be impertinent,” said his cousin, more tartly still. 

loris stood pale and silent under the boughs, and turned and 
went back to the house. 

“ You are breaking his heart, you cruel woman !” said 
Doughis Graeme, with a merry laugh. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


365 


She smiled, and bade him hold his tongue. She liked to be 
thought cruel and invulnerable. 

Dinner was soon after served as the moon rose, and loris 
was not again alone with her. He was excited, and talked 
and laughed with more animation than was his wont ; his eyes 
occasionally had a brilliant flash of light in them, that Mr. 
Challoner, who was an observant man, alone saw. 

“ He is glad we are going,” thought Mr. Challener, and 
pitied the man who knew his wife so little as to imagine she . 
would not come back. 

Mr. Challoner himself intended to come back: he liked 
the place ; he liked the shooting ; he liked the model pig-styes ; 
he liked, above all, leaving his wife there whilst he himself 
went to the baths. 

“ Not come back ? pas si hete r mused Mr. Challoner, as 
he ate his olives slowly and sipped his old lacryma with relish. 
Memories of some of loris’s careless signatures floated before 
his mental vision. There was no knowing ; things might be 
managed. Mortgages are elastic things, but they are given to 
sudden collapse like other elastic articles. The place would 
be a nice dower for his own little daughter, and he fancied 
there was a title that went with the land. So Mr. Challoner 
dreamed over loris’s olives and loris’s lacryma-christi. Mr. 
Challoner was a poor man indeed, but he was a practical man. 
loris was not practical. 

The moon shone in on the old dining-hall through the grated 
casements on to the dinner-table with its flowers, sweetmeats, 
and fruits, and flashed on the silver dagger that was run 
through the Lady Joan’s braided hair. 

loris’s feverish vivacity had changed into an absorbed silence. 
He was thinking of another woman whom the moonbeams 
might soon find there. 

Outside the nightingales were singing. 

Lady Joan looked at his averted face. 

“ Poor fellow,” she thought, “ how unhappy he is !” 

There is always something pathetic about a person who is 
utterly and entirely deceived. In her absolute self-deception 
even Lady Joan became pathetic. 

The dinner was long. Mr. Challoner and Burletta both 
liked their dinners. When at last it was over. Lady Joan 
caught up her guitar, threw its riband over her shoulders, and 
81 * 


366 


FRIENDSHIP. 


sauntered out into the cortile, and thence into the garden once 
more. 

“ Come with me, lo !” she called to him. 

He hesitated, then obeyed with laggard step. 

Douglas Graeme this time was too discreet to follow them, 
lie stayed in the court with Mr. Challoner, and smoked. 

It was nine o’clock ; the grass was dewy beneath their feet ; 
the crescent moon was sinking. As loris joined her outside 
the gate in the fragi’ant darkness, she stretched out her hand, 
and curled her arm about his, and leaned towards him. 

She took his stillness and his irresponsiveness for grief and 
for anger. 

“ Don’t mind it so much,” she said, tenderly. “ I shall 
con)e back as soon as ever I can, and I will write every day, 
and you might meet me in Paris, as you have done before, 
lo ! how pale you are !” 

“ It is a shock to me to lose you so suddenly,” he muttered, 
and he wound his arm about her as she leaned against his 
shoulder. 

“ I cannot tell her now,” he thought. “ It will be easier to 
write it, and it will hurt her less.” 

So the lie passed, that for evermore he was never to undo 
and unwind from about his life. 

As he stooped his head where they stood together in the 
twilit garden ways, and kissed her, he felt disloyal and un- 
faithful ; but it was not the disloyalty to her that smote him, 
— not the unfaithfulness to her that stung him with its sense 
of shame. 

He felt disloyal to the other lips that he had touched that 
day ; he felt unfaithful to the fairer faith that had come to 
him with the April blossoms like a gift of God. 

“ Amor mio !” murmured his mistress, flinging her arms 
about his throat in that fierce tenderness with which in her 
strange way she loved him. 

The nightingales were singing in the leaves. He could 
have strangled them for that jarring tumult of song. 

loris shuddered under the embrace ; but he submitted to it. 

“I cannot tell her the truth to-night,” he thought. 

Alas ! tor him the day was never to dawn that should hear 
him tell it her. 

The lovely deep azure of the sky was above them, with 


FRIENDSHIP. 


367 


here and there the clusters of the stars ; the air was full of 
the fresh fragance of the spring ; near them were the glossy 
dark leaves of an orange-tree and the curling tendrils of a 
purple clematis that covered the old gray wall of the cor- 
tile. He never again saw this garden path of his old 
home, by evening-time, in starlight, without a sickly passion 
of regret. 

If he had but put her arms from about his throat, and told 
her the truth then ! 

The summer night waned and passed, and the sunrise came, 
and a day of hurry, turmoil, nuisance, noise, business, followed 
it, and with the fall of evening she went from Fiordelisa ; and 
he let her go, still with the truth untold. 

“ It will be easier written,” he said to himself, with the 
procrastinating habit of a hesitating and indolent temperament, 
and stood in the glare and dust and uproar of the railway 
terminus, seeing the train for the North steam slowly out into 
the golden haze, past the old broken temples and the ruined 
aqueducts. 

She had gone, believing a falsehood ; she had gone, believing 
him broken-hearted ; she had gone, saying to him, “ I shall 
be back by harvest,” and thinking to herself, “ How he will 
miss me ! What will he do ?” 

And he let her go wrapped in the happy lie that her own 
vanity made her accept with so simple a credulity, like the 
merest peasant maiden that ever lent an ear to the whispers 
of her own amorous vanity. 

He let her go, self-deluded. 

As the steam drifted over the distant Campagna and the 
train vanished in the yellow mists of the hot evening, he drew 
a deep breath, like a man who casts from his shoulders a bur- 
den borne too long. 

Then he went to the woman he loved. 

The sunset splendors of the falling night were streaming 
through the glow of roses on the terrace as with glad and im- 
petuous eagerness he entered her presence and threw himself 
at her feet. 

“ Rejoice with me !” he cried: “ she is gone !” 

“Gone?” 

He laughed aloud in the gayety and gladness of his re- 
lease. 


368 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ She is gone I — yes. I am a slave no more j for your love 
is an empire and not a bondage.” 

The nightingales sung in a palm-tree that a passion-flower 
clung to and climbed, and their song was beautiful to him. 


CHAPTER XXXIII. 

It is true she was gone, but not gone as those who leave no 
trace, — not gone as those who go forever. All things spoke 
of her at Fiordelisa ; her clothes hung on the pegs ; her guitar 
was cast on a couch ; her cigars filled an old silver ostensoir ; 
her alpenstock and her sun-umbrella leaned together in the 
loggia ; her legacy of orders and commands weighed on every 
dependant and occupied every hour. When loris went up 
there next day, and as his first act of freedom loosened the 
hound from his chain, he shuddered as the signs of her pres- 
ence met him everywhere : they were also the menaces of her 
return. 

Imperator gambolled to and fro with mad joy, having no 
prescience of future captivity that should avenge on him his 
present raptures. But his master could not shake off all 
foreboding. 

As the days wore on, the electric wires shocked him into 
unwelcome remembrance of her with messages that he cast 
impatiently aside or as impatiently answered; and the post 
brought him long close pages of amorous words, mingled in 
odd union with a thousand directions as to vineyards and 
brood-mares, and old furniture and new cattle, which he threw 
away but half read indeed, yet which served to keep ever 
present to him the tyrant who was absent. 

Again and again he took up his pen to write the truth to 
her, and be free. 

But again and again he deferred the ungracious task that 
was hard to word aright, and forbore to do more than reply 
that the brood-mare had foaled, or that the rains had hurt the 
young vines. 

He was so content with her away, he dreaded to launch the 


FRIENDSHIP. 


369 


bolt that might free him forever indeed, but whieh might call 
her back fleet and ferocious, riding the whirlwind of vengeance ; 
who could be sure ? 

He strove to forget her as utterly as her insistent and con- 
tinual messages and letters would allow ; he dared not risk the 
recall which he feared the truth, when told, would prove to a 
woman who, as his knowledge of her told him, would never 
passively accept dismissal or forgive infidelity. 

To Etoile he said, “ She is in trouble ; death is around her : 
she is not thinking of me. Before she dreams of returning, 
I will tell her : that will be time enough.” 

She did not insist : she thought he would always do what 
honor needed. But when he asked her to go with him to 
Fiordelisa she would not: a sense of aversion made her shrink 
from the thought. 

“ Fiordelisa is very dear to me, because it is yours. But 
wait,” she said to him. “ Let her memory be exorcised ; let 
all trace of her be gone ; then I will come. To me it shall 
be so sacred : everything shall be as it was in your mother s 
time. You will tell me what she liked best, and we will have 
it so ; but wait. Let all signs of the woman who has so cruelly 
profaned it first pass away.” 

He loved her for her answer, and was half glad, though 
half angry, that she would not go there ; yet the reply made 
him ill at ease ; she took for granted, as so natural and so 
simple, that dethronement which he knew could not be com- 
passed without tempest and revolution, perhaps not even with- 
out ruin. 

When Etoile said to him with a smile, not thinking to hurt 
him, “ Let your priest asperge it with holy water and strew 
rosemary, — that is the old charm to cleanse places from evil 
possession, — then I will come,” he did not smile in answer. 
A vague fear, dark, sullen, menacing, as the temper of the 
woman whom he must brave, weighed on him. Again and 
again he thought, with passionate futile regret, “ Why did I 
not tell her all that night, when she kissed me, and I loathed 
her?” 

It would have been so quickly told then ; one flash of light- 
ning, and the storm would have broken over his head and 
burst and rolled away. 

Now, the storm lowering hung in the distant sky and over- 
Q* 


370 


FRIENDSHIP. 


shadowed the brightness of each rising day. Every morning 
that he rose he thought to himself, “ If she should come back 
to-night !” The dread of her was always with him. Where 
Tennyson makes his Guinevere say, — 

‘‘Our bond is not the bond of man and wife : 

This good is in it, whatsoe’er of ill, 

It can be broken easier,” — 

he wrote of a world far away, in which Guinevere would 
meekly end in “ holy house at Almesbury,” a sorrowful weak 
woman, sore troubled with one sin, where modern ladies lightly 
bear a bushel such and never feel them. But now that Gui- 
nevere needs no sanctuary, finding all she needs in the bosom 
of a tender and long-suffering society, and repentance and re- 
morse lie with other archaic words embalmed in the dust of 
dictionaries whence no one takes them out, — now the bonds 
of Guinevere are the hardest the world forges, and if Launce- 
lot dare to strike for freedom the world will frown him back 
to bondage and tell him that in fealty to his traitress his duty 
lies and all his honor. 

Meanwhile, except for this sudden fear which sometimes 
started up and seized him, as in a dream of the night a cold 
hand seems to seize the sleeper and hold him in a horrid 
wakefulness, loris was happy as since his boyish days he never 
had been. A woman who loved him perfectly, questioned 
him never, and could not weary him, because of the frequent 
surprises and unfathomed depths of a nature which he still but 
vaguely understood, though its strength and its simplicity were 
alike lovely to him, — such a woman awoke all the joys of his 
youth. 

He felt young once more as he hastened through the noon 
warmth or the evening moonlight to dream his fresh dream 
as he looked in the eyes of Etoile. It could not last, he knew, 
this rose-glow of sunrise, this golden hush and glory of a love 
that was like daybreak ; it could not last : it must pass into 
the limbo of dead passions as daybreak passes into the common 
likeness of all time, filled with the noise and trouble of the 
world ; but whilst it lasted it was so fair ; he bade it stay, as 
Faust cried to it before him : being happy. 

It was the same with her. 

It was enough for her to listen for his step, to hearken for 


FRIENDSHIP. 


371 


his voice, to remember his touch and his look when he was 
gone, to feel the very air grow lighter, the very earth seem 
lovelier, because he came ; she had been but a muse before, 
how sweet it was to stoop and become mortal ! To love the 
life that loves you ! None can know how deep a delight it is, 
save those who long have dwelt alone, sufficient to themselves, 
in the asceticism of the arts and all the cold contemptuous soli- 
tude of fame. 

When he was absent, she kept his memory with her as 
Elaine kept the shield at Astolat, embroidering it with every 
beautiful fancy and with every knightly symbol ; when he was 
there she had but one thought, to give him the peace, the 
pride, the joy, of life so long denied him. 

Being strong, she would not show her strength to him. 
Being proud, she would not show her pride to him. Having 
been called by men cold, too scornful, hard to please, it pleased 
her now to stoop and wait upon his smile and let him see how 
weak, so far as a great love is weakness, she could be at his 
behest. 

Vain women delight to make their power felt; but Etoile, 
who was not vain, but who had laid her strength upon the 
world, as the driver his whip upon the ass’s neck, and knew 
her strength, and had seen men bend beneath it and before it, 
Etoile found her joy in stooping lowly in meek obedience. 

He was not wiser, greater, goodlier than many another no 
doubt, she had found him in his bondage and known him in his 
weakness ; he was not lord of himself nor yet of others ; but 
he was what she loved ; the only creature that she loved- ; the 
only life that was dear to her, and that taught her the mere 
common joys of earth, and made her know the sweetness of 
human lips and the light of human eyes ; she had dwelt alone 
and apart, and now she lived for him ; she fancied that for 
this sweet surprise of human mastery no payment of her whole 
life could be enough. 

Out of the deep abundance of her pity love had risen, and 
she now wondered that she had lived — not knowing love. 

It was like a trance that fell upon her, — a trance whose 
visions are of heaven, whilst those who stand by and look on 
say. This is death. 

The conflict that was before her was one that needed to be 
fought in mud and mire, with rough weapons, with harsh 


372 


FRIENDSHIP. 


thrusts, with merciless coarse blows on low and craven foes ; 
but of the conflict she thought nothing ; she only was happy, 
— with her hand in his. 


CHAPTER XXXIV. 

The world had grown quite empty round them ; all the 
idlers and pleasure-seekers had flown away; in Rome there 
were no sounds but of the fall of the fountains and the thrill 
of the guitars at uightfall. 

Lady Cardifi* was the last to go. 

She came to bid Etoile farewell one day at Rocaldi towards 
the close of the day: she guessed much, but she inquired 
nothing, being a woman who knew the world. Only airily 
and indifferently she said, at the close of her visit, — 

“ Do you mean to stay here all the summer ? My dear, it 
will try your health. These grand old gardens harbor death, 
you know. At least you will die if you wish to live, and live 
if you wish to die people always do ; a young mother will 
die as she gives her child its flrst kiss, and a hospital for in- 
curables will remain full to its roof! Very odd: the gods 
do jest with us. Apropos^ I conclude you know old Lady 
Archiestoune is dead in London ? Our dear Joan is gone over ; 
filial piety, you know ; some people do say it’s the Messina 
Bridge instead. Anyhow, she is gone. How comfortable 
loris must be 1 — like a boy out of school, I should think. I 
suppose you see him still sometimes? Now, I wonder if he 
will let her come back ? he ought not : it is his one chance 
of salvation : no one has that sort of chance twice. 

^ There is a tide, which, taken at the flood, 

Leads on to fortune.* 

True statement, but most involved metaphor, like most of 
Shakspeare’s. A tide cannot lead you anywhere : it may float 
you.” 

Lady Cardiff dropped her eyeglass, having seen what she 
feared in Etoile’s changing eyes. 

“ Come and see my great palms,” said Etoile, and led her 


FRIENDSHIP. 


373 


out to the gardens where two of the stateliest palms of Rome 
towered in the light as they stood perchance in distant days 
of Horace. 

Lady Cardiff lifted her eyeglass to them. 

“ I don’t care for any vegetables,” she said, as she looked. 
“ I am like Dr. Johnson : I like the street-posts and the peo- 
ple that walk past them. Still, they are fine trees. I can see 
that. But only look how they are stifled under those passion- 
flowers : quite an allegory, — isn’t it ? you should write a poem 
on it. Won’t you have the passion-flowers cut down?” 

“ And my poor nightingales that sing all night in the passion- 
flowers? Oh, no 1” 

“ Passion-flowers and nightingales 1 Most poetic !” said 
Lady Cardiff, almost crossly. “ But I wish the air were bet- 
ter, my dear : you will excuse me if I am prosaic. A well- 
trapped drain is the best poetry, after all.” 

“ The air is beautiful,” said Etoile, with a smile that made 
her face at once tender and thoughtful and full of that name- 
less light, like a flame shining through alabaster, which only a 
great joy gives. 

“ Poison 1” said Lady Cardiff, sharply. 

Then on a sudden impulse she touched Etoile’s forehead 
with her lips. 

“ Grod bless you, my love ! Cut the passion-flowers down ; 
they will only choke the palms, believe me, only choke them. 
I wish you were not going to stay here with the nightingales ; 
but you are the best judge of the air that suits you, and you 
are your own mistress, and I am not an old friend to have the 
right to scold you. I wish I were. Adieu !” 

“ What business had he to grow his passion-flowers there ?” 
she thought, with anger, to herself, as her carriage rolled out 
of the ilex shadows of Rocaldi. “ If he will have strength 
enough it will all come right ; but he will not have strength : 
he will let that black-browed jade return, and there will be 
nothing but misery out of it ^1 for the innocent one. It is 
always so. How loyal she is to him, too ! — not a word of his 
name ! Dear ! dear 1 what a pity she came I She was so con- 
tent, and so calm, and so cold, and so wrapped in her dreams 
and creations, and now — he will have no strength. It is she 
who will be sacrificed, and she will live and die with a broken 
heart on that bare rock of hers all alone in the middle of the 

32 


374 


FRIENDSHIP. 


open sea, and our dear Joan will count up her money, and 
grin to the end of her days, — triumphant. Lord, what fools 
men are ! Oh, the pity of it, the pity of it, lago !” 

Then Lady Cardiff went home with the tears in her eyes, 
and almost could have cried with rage and vexation : so much 
did she take it to heart that, though the German Embassy 
had sent her some choicest four-year old Johannisberg, and 
“Figaro” had just come in, and there was a telegram to say 
that Lord Cardiff was punished for his sins with the gout, she 
could enjoy none of these good things, but sat silent and out 
of spirits until her servants told her the hour drew nigh for 
the train to the North. 

A watcher less merciful and as keen of sight — one who did 
not come beneath the ilex shadows of Rocaldi, but neverthe- 
less kept vigil on what passed there — remained down in the 
city throughout the sultry season : Lady Joan had left her 
watch-dog chained by the Forum Trajano. 

In their grim, dusky, dusty corner the three sisters remained 
to copy canvases and panels, and be cited as instances of filial 
love, because they sent their old parents to a lodging by the 
sea. 

“ Such dear, good daughters !” said Society, with its last 
breath, flying itself away. 

Whilst the poor old father, tormented by sun and sand and 
fleas and gnats, tottering about on the shore with his deaf wife 
upon his arm, felt that Began and Goneril might have been 
better to bear than Cordelias who kept the purse-strings, and 
measured the whisky, and scolded from morn to eve, and 
heaped up their own devoted sacrifices like coals of fire on his 
head. Lear after all had much to be thankful for, thought 
Lord George : Lear at any rate was left alone. 

The sisters had hoped that the wide empty chambers and 
the majestic solitudes of Fiordelisa would have been placed at 
their disposal, in her absence, by their dear friend who loved 
them with a thousand loves ; part of the summer there had 
been part of their perennial payment, and to stay there in her 
absence could have been no impropriety with their mother’s 
knitting-needles and their father’s crutch in the antechamber. 
But their dear friend had gone, kissing them all indeed, but 
making otherwise no sign, — Lady Joan did not choose to have 
even so harmless and faithful a creature as her Cerberus in- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


375 


stalled ever so temporarily in her throne, — and loris said 
nothing. loris did not even ask them up for a day. So their 
hopes fell fruitless, as they had seen so many hopes fall, 
knowing well what hell it is in waiting to abide dancing at- 
tendance on the whims and wills, caprices and commands, of 
other people. And they stayed down in their close, pent-up 
old palace amidst the evil smells of the city with no other 
consolation than that they would have time to finish copying 
frescoes of Domenichino ordered by Lord Hebrides out of good 
nature and clannish feeling, and that they could perhaps be 
still more sure of what he whom it was their task to watch 
should do in the absence of the one who claimed his life. 

The task was difficult, though they deemed it easy. loris, 
knowing he was watched, turned restive, and put out his wit 
to baffle them. They were no match for him in that social 
diplomacy when he chose to exercise his skill. He was as 
courteous, as cordial, as compassionate as ever with these poor 
toiling women, whom he really pitied ; but when they tried to 
spy on him, he baffled them. 

He met their questions with serene indifference ; he parried 
their curiosity with calm evasions. 

“ It is what they deserve, if they persecute me,” he said to 
himself ; and he beat them with their own weapons. 

What affair was it of theirs ? 

Once or twice he went and watched Maijory at work in 
Santa Maria degli Angeli on her Domenichino, and gave her 
counsel with the delicate and unerring taste in art which 
characterized him. Sometimes he sat with them in their own 
dull, dreary chamber : when he did so it was with intent to 
blind them. 

“ Etoile ? I really can tell you but little. She is shut up 
in her villa, absorbed on some great work for next season’s 
salon,” he would answer them, and say it so indifferently and 
naturally that it almost deceived them. Almost ; not quite, 
for Marjory, whose soul was sick with haunting dread, would 
now and then get a hired carriage to take her out of the gates 
along the dusty high-roads and tlie yellow grass to where the 
ilex thickets of Rocaldi hung in the ruby glow of sunset light, 
a green oasis in the burnt-up desert, and went about under 
the walls till twilight fell, and once, twice, thrice she saw a 
form she knew, and heard the ring of a horse’s hoof, and loris 


376 


FRIENDSHIP. 


passed her, not noticing a woman’s figure low bent in the 
meadows, as though gathering herbs. 

Then Marjory went home, pressing the jagged iron of 
hungry jealousy in her breast, and wrote a letter to her bosom 
friend away in England, and added in a postscript, as though 
carelessly, “ lo is quite well, I believe. . We really see nothing 
of him now you are away. They say he spends all his time 
at Etoile’s villa, — the archaeological picture, I suppose 1 Au 
revoir^ dearest !” 

Lady Joan got the letter when she was sitting alone in the 
little house in Mayfair. 

Her grandmother was dead, which was odious, because she 
could not go to Prince’s and show off her skating, which was 
admirable, nor go anywhere else that was amusing, and was 
bored to death with her uncles and aunts and relatives gen- 
erally, and grew quite pale with having to do propriety so long 
unrelieved by any touch of color or diversion. She had sold 
two painted coffers she had sent to a loan collection, and she 
had lent some lace and uncut garnets to a Stafford House 
charity, and she had gone to a Westminster Service with the 
head of the Opposition, and she had visited the Royal Academy 
with Tom Tonans and his wife, and had altogether been so 
steeped in the Jordan of respectability that she felt, as soon 
as she could get out of her mourning, she might dance the 
Carmagnole with perfect impunity wheresoever she liked. 
Still, Jordan had bored her. It bores most people. And 
though this bi-annual dipping in it was deemed necessary by 
Mr. Challoner, she felt that never — no, never again — could 
she go through it ; she had always felt so whenever she had 
bathed ; yet she had always returned to dip afresh, being a 
woman in whom, after all, prudence was stronger than prefer- 
ences. 

Now, as she sat in her bedroom she read the postscript to 
her watch-dog’s warning. She had had a letter by the same 
post from loris ; she had read it first of all ; she now seized 
it and read it again. Re-perused by the lurid light of that 
postscript’s suggestions, the letter seemed to her no lover’s 
effusion, — seemed cold, brief, unsatisfactory. It told her that 
the mare had foaled and that the vines were healthy : hardly 
anything else. The devoto ed affettuoso, Ireneo, of the signa- 
ture seemed to her at the end to be scrawled off, as if the writer 


FRIENDSHIP. 


377 


were glad to be rid of an unwelcome task. A million sus- 
picions darted out like little stings from between the lines and 
seemed to hiss at her. 

All day long and every day as she bathed in Jordan, as she 
went in her crape to hear the will read, uninterested because 
there was hardly anything to leave, and what there was went 
to her father and aunts, — as she smothered her yawns while 
the head of the Opposition discussed a crabbed and vexed pas- 
sage of Dante with her, — aa she toiled through the Academy, 
where nothing interested her, because she only liked the old 
masters, the dear old masters, who could be bought in a garret 
and sold at a profit, — as she travailed over documents, reports, 
and accounts, to persuade recalcitrant shareholders, and fasci- 
nate unwilling presidents, and effect herculean transfers, all 
day long, — in everything she did there was always one wasp’s 
sting always festering in her, — the fear of what loris might 
be doing in Rome. 

Call him she dared not. 

She had just brought her transfer to boiling-point. She 
had just mended and painted her broken jar. She had just 
managed so beautifully that all the sheep that were silly as 
swine would go over the steep all alone, and the shepherds be 
safe with their fleeces. If he came, all would be ruined : he 
was such a fool. Over the steep he would go himself ; he 
would break the mended pot, he would throw the soup away 
as it boiled. He would even sell Fiordelisa. Yet every hour 
of the day, smiling on dowagers, listening to deans, and talking 
of Dante, every day plunging at morn into finance, and wash- 
ing in Jordan at even, every hour the terror thrilled through 
her, — if he should be with Etoile I 

She did not much fear it, because to be blind with a su- 
preme vanity is like being shut in a windowless room lined 
with looking-glasses. Yet the vague dread was there. At 
the bark of her watch-dog it sprang up full-armed. 

She was alone in her bedroom, that looked over the smoke- 
blackened roofs of Mayfair, with sooty sparrows twittering on 
the sill. With a pang of passionate longing she thought of 
her bedroom at Fiordelisa, the roses clinging round it, the 
sweet azure sky beyond it, the old sculptured shields above it, 
a thrush singing on an orange-bough, and the voice of her 
lover calling from the old gray court, Mia cara^ chefai tuf 


378 


FRIENDSHIP. 


She was not a tender-natured woman, nor one to be touched 
by sudden memories, but at that moment the hot fierce tears 
rushed to her eyes and throat ; at that moment, for once, she 
loved with love, and not with self-love ; she felt that all the 
world and its small gains and its shallow hypocrisies would be 
well lost to lean upon his breast, to look into his eyes. 

“ If she dare teke him from me !” she said in her teeth, 
and a bitterer oath than men can swear was smothered in the 
heat and harshness of her soul. 

Take him from her ! 

Weak women would have fled to Rome, leaving the soup 
boiling over, the pot unglazed, the sheep unsheared ; but she 
was strong. 

She washed the scorching tears from her eyes, she swal- 
lowed the choking fury in her throat, she put on her crape 
gown and went down-stairs to where her lord perused the 
newspapers and her aunts sat penning letters of thanks for 
condolence in bereavement. 

“ I have heard from lo,” she said, frankly, with that frank- 
ness which never deserted her even on the shores of Jordan 
and in the house in Mayfair. “ I have heard from lo. He 
wants to come over : do you think we could get the transfer 
signed this week ? I should like to give him a pleasant sur- 
prise if he do come.” 

Mr. Challoner laid down the newspaper and considered 
gravely. 

“ I think we could,” he said, after a pause. “ I will go 
down to Cannon Street and see if I can hurry them on. Is 
he really coming? Well, the change might do him good ; he 
is not very strong.” 

For Mr. Challoner also could read between the lines, and 
wanted himself very much to get free to go to Germany for 
those waters which were so vitally necessary for his little 
daughter’s health, and also he was fully alive to the fact that 
his wife’s maiden aunts, stately gentlewomen of old-fashioned 
notions, were within hearing at their writing-table. Therefore 
he spoke with that cordial good humor and good understanding 
which he always put on when they were washing in Jordan. 

“ I will go with you,” said his wife, and turned to her aunts. 
“ You will excuse me, won’t you, dear aunties ? It is a busi- 
ness affair in which Robert and I are very interested for the 


FRIENDSHIP. 


379 


sake of some friends, a sad speculation of poor lo’s that I am 
afraid will not turn out very well, even with the very best 
that we can do.” 

“ Of course we have nothing to do with the affairs of Prince 
loris, nothing,” explained Mr. Challoner to the ladies at the 
writing-table, as he was in the habit of explaining it to so- 
ciety, — “ nothing at all, poor fellow ; but there has been a 
good deal of English capital put into this affair in Sicily, and 
so it seems one’s duty, really one’s duty ” 

And Mr. Challoner took out his handkerchief and polished 
his eyeglasses, not ending his sentence, knowing all the virtue 
that lies in the vague. 

“ I don’t really know how loris stands,” continued Mr. 
Challoner, with an air of protest, “ one is always so delicate 
on these matters with friends ; but I am afraid his good nature 
has been abused, his imagination run away with. Co-directors? 
Yes, we are co-directors, it is true ; but he has assumed personal 
responsibilities that I never would have done; against my 
advice ; quite against my advice.” 

Mr. Challoner sighed and gazed into vacancy. 

‘‘ Is he so fond of speculation, then ?” said one of the ladies 
at the writing-table. 

“ It is his patriotism,” said Mr. Challoner : in the Temple 
of the Virtues every motive was always labelled with the very 
highest title procurable in nomenclature. 

“ Oh !” said the gentlewomen together ; they had lived in 
London and Paris all their lives, and had, before this, heard 
patriotism used as a reason for a variety of things, from a 
minister’s keeping in office against the will of the country, 
to a newspaper’s writing a country into bloodshed and bank- 
ruptcy : they were quite aware of the word’s elasticity. 

“ It is lo’s patriotism,” echoed the Lady Joan. “ If he 
thought he would do the country any good by it, he would 
jump down into a pit and let it swallow him like Curtius. It 
is very fine, you know, all that, but it does not pay. I always 
tell him he will get no recompense, and end in the poor-house. 
My dear Robert, get a hansom cab, quick !” 

Then she put on her crape veil, and drove with her hus- 
band to the city to hurry agents and secretaries, and get her 
mended pot baked in the muffle of European exchanges, and 


380 


FRIENDSHIP. 


drawn out as new pottery by those modern masters of destiny, 
the brokers. 

“ She seems to think of nothing but business,” said one of 
the gentlewomen left at the writing-table. 

Guinevere might in her jealousy throw the diamond in the 
moat. Lady Joan knew better. 

Business was dear to her, dear were all its pastimes and its 
profits ; she mewed herself in close misty dens of offices through 
the sweet summer days, and condemned herself to the dusty, 
dreary, noisy streets of London when the roses were all in 
bloom at Fiordelisa, that she might keep her mended pot sail- 
ing bravely and unbroken down the stream of speculation with 
the iron pots of safer and richer enterprise. To discern hausse 
and haisse^ to watch the rise and fall of gold, to correct the 
proofs of a prospectus and see a knot of shareholders smile, to 
captivate brokers and commission-agents, and to be up to her 
eyes in telegrams and despatches, — this was as the very breath 
of life to her, even in the misty, murky, sultry atmosphere 
of the City in midsummer. But chiefly was it so sweet to her 
because business forged the fetters that a tired love could not 
break ; business wove the shroud in which a dead love could 
be imprisoned in its grave, her own and no one else’s, even 
though dead, dead, dead ! 

The shrewd hard sense that underlay her amorous vanity told 
her that passion soon or late calls to deaf ears ; pipes, and none 
dance ; lifts its lips and meets no kiss ; but that the woman 
who has interwoven herself with a man’s fortunes, and bound 
his hands to hers with the hempen ropes of commonplace, 
every-day cares and troubles, has entered the very fibre of his 
life as the lichen enters the bark of the tree. 

The lichen may kill the tree ere its time, but what of that ? 
They are together till the end comes and the axe hews down 
both together. 

So she crushed the rage, and the fear, and the longing, all 
into her heart in silence, and drove down beside her lord to 
the City. For one short savage instant the Cleopatra had 
leaped up in her to o’erleap sea and mountains and reach Rome 
at a bound. But the Dame du Comptoir was still stronger 
than the Cleopatra, and she went and worked in the City, 
then sent a telegram — instead. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


381 


CHAPTER XXXV. 

Whilst in her hot heavy mourning garb, in the sooty air 
and the gas-lit little den of her agent’s office, sitting with 
brokers and lawyers, she spun her threads about her distant 
lover as the spider spins in the dark to catch the firefly that 
makes love in the starlight, Etoile, in her cool white garments, 
was walking amidst the blue lilies that filled the grass under 
her ilex groves. The chimes of a church were sounding near ; 
the bells of goats cropping the honeysuckle in the field beyond 
rang in unison softly ; the acacias were full of blossoms and 
of bees ; the strong voluptuous heat lay on the land like sleep 
on the eyes of a tired dreamer. 

She walked on, her white gown trailing on the flowering 
grasses ; she gathered a lily, and put it in her breast ; she held 
a fan of green palm-leaves between her and the setting sun ; 
a ripe fruit tumbled and rolled before her feet; light and 
silence were about her. 

“ How good is God !” she thought. “ How beautiful is 
life !” 

His shadow fell through the sunshine, his step came 
through the flowers, his eyes smiled down into hers, and 
his lips touched hers. 

“ Dreaming always !” he murmured. 

“ Dreaming of you ! Are you jealous of that?” 

“ No ; since your dreams are my prisoners.” 

He wound his arm about her ; he moved the sultry air with 
her fan of palms. They strayed through the flowering grasses 
together : their path was sweet with crushed herbs and dropped 
roses. 

“ You are happy ?” they asked each other. 

“ I am happy !” each answered the other. 

She said the whole truth, with no latent thought to mar it, 
when she said that she was happy. When he said the same 
words, a dark and restless care was tugging at his heart-strings, 
which, though he often forced it away, seldom wholly left 
him. 


382 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Ruin seemed near him, and vengeance nearer still. When 
in the sultry noons he wearily pored over the papers and ac- 
counts of the many enterprises and speculations into which 
friendship had allured him, he only succeeded in making his 
eyes and his heart ache ; when the electric wires shocked his 
nerves with unwelcome reminder that though his friend was 
absent in the flesh, in spirit she still stood at his elbow, he 
wearily cursed the inventive genius of his generation, and felt 
a breathless impatience and oppression, such as the magician 
felt who had forgotten the spell by which alone the shadows 
he had summoned could be bidden to dissolve and vanish. 

She would never come back, — all would be well ; so he 
said to himself, being of a nature that was sanguine even 
whilst apprehensive. 

He trusted in some vague way to some kind star that would 
control her course and turn it far from his. 

Meantime, he did nothing : he was happy, and the peril 
was distant ; and he ceased to go to Fiordelisa. Her memo- 
ries were too present there, like the scent of sandal-wood that 
is stronger than the scent of roses, and cannot be driven out, 
do what you will ; and the mem#i’ies stifled him, and he hated 
them. They were only deodorized when the hand of Etoile 
lay in his. 

The old hereditary love of his father’s home was always in 
him, but the place was poisoned to him : when he looked at 
its threshing floors, its levelled lawns, its freshly cleared and 
naked gardens, its hotbeds and plantations and stock-yards, 
the price which all these things had cost seemed written on 
them in ruinous figures ; and through the solitude, when the 
throb of the English farm- engines ceased for a moment, he 
still seemed to hear the voice of his tyrant crying out, “ lo, 
lo !” as the voice of the horseleech cries, “ Give, give !” 

It used to be so beautiful, so shadowy, so still, before she 
came, he thought, and felt that his people had been right 
when they had wanted to take their axes and hew in pieces 
the machines that she had brought, yelling and vomiting fire 
and black smoke, into the sweet, serene, classic woodland 
silence of that fair hill-side. 

The noisy, fussy, screaming engine, blackening the blue sky 
and searing the flowery gTass, seemed her meet emblem. 

He sighed, and left the place, and went to where a woman 


FRIENDSHIP. 383 

clad in white was painting in a fragrant solitary place, with the 
blue passion-flower curling about the casements. 

“ Teach me to forget all in my life save yourself,” he mur- 
mured. 

And Etoile listened to his prayer, and let him steep himself 
in welcome oblivion, when, to be wise, she should have harried 
and lashed him with remembrance till he should have risen 
and stood free. 

But then she loved him. 

Women who, in their warmest passions, love but themselves 
cannot understand this utter obedience to an unwise will, this 
tender submission to an unreasoning weakness, this absolute 
self-negation. 

Yet nothing less is love. 

Meanwhile this great submission given him intoxicated him 
like new wine : he thought himself, as he jestingly said, the 
magician that had called the solitary star down from heaven 
to earth, and made it his. 

“ Whilst you shone aloof, and aloft, above this world, all the 
while you were waiting for me !” he said, with a smile, that 
she did not see was too victorious. 

Had she been a lowlier woman, perhaps he would not have 
been so careless of her peace through being so proud of her 
glory. As it was, he, so long a slave, was never tired of feel- 
ing himself a king in a vaster and nobler dominion than any 
he had ever known. 

This woman would have stood haughty and indifi’erent be- 
fore a howling world, unblenching and serene. He knew that 
he alone could make her grow pale as a chidden child, grow 
flushed as a sun-kissed rose. 

“ The world will forget you, hidden here,” he said, one day. 

Etoile smiled. 

“ Let it forget me. What matter?” 

“ No, you must not let it forget you. I love that ring of 
light about your head that men call fame : it becomes you.” 

“ The ring of light makes the eyes ache sometimes, and 
sometimes makes the path under one’s feet dark enough,” she 
answered him, and thought, with a little pang, “ Is it less 
myself he loves than that halo about my name ?” 

For it is possible to be the rival of oneself ; and a vague 
apprehension touched her. 


384 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Do you know,” she said, dreamily, “ sometimes the ring 
of light seems to me like that chain of fireflies that cruel 
Mexican women wear at their balls and feasts ? for every point 
of light a little life dies in pain : so, in such notoriety as we 
who are famous get, with each glitter some little sweetness 
of peace, or joy, or obscurity, perishes. Our light is made 
of dying things.” 

“ That is pretty, but foolish, my dear,” he answered her. 

Fame is like wealth or rank or power : it gilds and burnishes 
the dulness of life. Perhaps I never should have looked at 
you had you been only a mere woman, — not Etoile 1” 

He meant nothing, yet the words stung her. 

They seemed to her to say that his joy over and in her was 
rather triumph than tenderness, — -rather the pursuit of pride 
than of love. Her heart ached with a sudden longing to be 
the lowliest creature that lived, but only loved by him for her- 
self, and not for the uncertain fitful light that the world’s rays 
shed on her. 

“ Whenever,” had wise Yoightel once said to her, “ when- 
ever (if ever) you do love, you will be for a few months the 
most happy, and forever after the saddest, of women.” The 
first part of the prophecy had come to pass, and she had 
proved its sweet truth ; now and then she thought of the lat- 
ter half with a chill vague apprehension. 

Not that she had any real sense of the real perils that lay 
for her in the worn-out passion of another woman, which was 
cast behind her, she thought, like a crushed, killed snake. 

Whilst she dreamed thus amidst the passion-flowers open- 
ing their purple hearts to the sun, she was too happy and too 
unwise to measure or even perceive the coarse and common 
perils that environed her, or to know the danger that lay for 
her in an absent enemy who seemed to her too low to merit 
. any kind of fear. 

She had found loris an unwilling bondsman ; whilst yet a 
stranger he had let her see his galled weariness of the net that 
held him ; now that he loved her, it no more would have 
seemed possible for him to desert her for his tyrant’s service 
than it would have seemed possible for a nightingale, freed of 
the trap, to re-enter it by choice instead of singing his song 
of rejoicing in the moonlight, fluttering free wings. She 
never thought of his absent mistress as any peril to himself 


FRIENDSHIP. 


385 


or her. He was his own master, he was free ; he loved her, 
he had shaken olF him an unworthy and galling servitude : 
it never passed across her fancy that Lady Joan was still a 
danger for them both. 

She knew that he wrote to England, but this he naturally 
accounted for by his own entangled affairs. “ They can ruin 
me,” he said, under his breath, and would not tell her more 
clearly, save that they had his signatures to many obligations, 
and had drawn him into many embarrassments that could not 
be lightly disentangled or cleared away. 

He never told the truth of his affairs to Etoile, because he 
thought her too visionary to care for or to comprehend the 
entanglements of finance ; partly also because he was always 
in his own heart ashamed of having been caught in those 
entanglements, and was conscious that for the descendant of a 
line of warrior-nobles and of knightly princes the questionable 
honor of the Bourse, and of its legalized gambling, was not 
wise or dignified or even clean of conscience enough to be 
fitting. 

“ Make me what you think me,” he had said to her ; and 
whilst with her he was all she thought him. Away from her, 
the lower aims and the coarser efforts in which his late years 
had been steeped by one evil influence might resume their 
sway, but in her presence the impressionable temper of loris 
made him truly rise to the heights on which he could meet 
and unite with hers. 

Once she had said to him, “ If they can ruin you, as you 
say, cut through all these nets of speculation, these Gordian 
knots of obligation ; cut through them all, let it cost what it 
may, and come out from them with your honor safe and free, 
if it leave you poor.” 

He was tempted to follow her counsel ; he was tempted to 
cast Fiordelisa and his last remnants of fortune into the 
hands of the harpies of finance, and rescue by such loss at 
least his manhood and his liberty. 

But his temper was too hesitating for so irrevocable and 
headlong a plunge into the unknown. He temporized ; he 
hoped ; he waited ; he trusted ; he dallied with danger, be- 
lieving that thus he exorcised it. 

“ You do not understand, my angel,” ho would say to her, 
and close her lips to silence with his kisses when she would 
K 33 


386 


FRIENDSHIP. 


have urged him to say more. He told her little, because 
these things beside her seemed to him so poor and gross and 
mean ; he felt also that he had been in a large measure the 
dupe of circumstances that he should never have allowed to 
gather round him, and he did not care for the one living 
creature who saw in him all that the ideal of his youth had 
once dreamed of becoming, to be roused from her faith and 
her dreams to hear the common sorry story of fortunes em- 
barrassed by unwise enterprise and by foolish credulities. 

He could not bear to lower himself in her eyes. If he had 
understood her more truly, he would have known that nothing 
would have turned her from him ; that she would have for- 
given him any crime, even what is harder to forgive than crime, 
— any folly, or even any faithlessness. But he did not 
understand aright ; and so he erred and went on in silence. 

And all the while through the hot summer, written words, 
or words brought by the electric wires, startled him from his 
dreams, and stung him as mosquitoes sting, the sting making 
him rise hot, irritable, and wearily awakened. 

She who was absent knew how to send such words ; blows 
to rivet loosened bolts, baits to allure vague ambitions, threats 
to alarm apprehensive honor, thorns to pierce and inflame 
careless indolence ; words that, like the pale, invisible hosts of 
the mosquitoes, gave no rest. 

Over and over again he was on the point of severing forever 
the ropes that held the bark of his fate to the quicksands of 
speculation. But ere ever the resolve could become accom- 
plished fact, his tyrant, ever with him even in absence, cried, 
“ Hold !” and he paused, and doubted, and waited, as he 
waited to tell her the truth, until forever it became too late. 

Etoile knew but little of such things ; what poet or artist 
does ? and she knew his love of his own old place, and dreaded 
to urge on him any haste in action which might imperil it. 

“ Even if they ruin you I have enough,” she said once : 
he kissed her, but said, “ My angel, that would not do ; I 
could not live upon a woman : let me free Fiordelisa in my 
own way.” 

Art seemed but little to her now. 

She sketched his features again and again, modelled them 
in clay, and never tired of that ; but those long, glad, pure 
days of absolute absorption in her work, when she used to 


FRIENDSHIP. 387 

have no re^et, but to see the light fade as the sunset, — those 
were over forever. 

Although her physicians had ordered her to rest for a year, 
she did not now obey them ; with his words came the desire to 
do something more beautiful for him than she had ever done 
for Art alone, something with which his fancy and his features 
should mingle and his very being be embalmed. With the 
true artist, Love finds an itivoluntary utterance in Art, as the 
passion of the bird finds utterance in its song. 

In her villa there was a large chamber with tapestried walls 
jutting out into the garden, with all the rank riot of lush grass 
and wild fiowers round about it ; here she made her studio, 
and here, when he was not with her, she passed all her hours, 
like Raffaelle, seeing but one face, paint what she would, in 
that absolute constancy and absorption of every thought, of 
every breath, of every fancy, throughout absence, which is 
the true fidelity of a life. Did he ever realize all that this 
gave him, all that this meant, then and hereafter ? Scarcely : 
with him love was a thing half of the sentiment, half of the 
senses, and he smiled sometimes to see it become to her holy 
as religion, deep-rooted as the hope of immortality. 

“Who should ever love you, as you love?” he thought; 
and then he kissed her, and what need was there of any 
subtleties of thought or word ? 

Passion imperious, exacting, cruel, domineering, had long 
preyed upon his life, but passion tender, obedient, intense, and 
full of that humility to which a great love bends down the 
strongest, was strange to him. There were times when he 
half feared it, as in the old days of visions men half feared 
the angels that came to them in the night. 

That first fancy of her, as half a muse and half a saint, 
was with him still, and though he had made the muse see no 
face but his own, and the saint droop to a love all of earth, 
and was glad and triumphant, yet with a man’s inconsistency 
he was tempted to regret that he had not passed by and left 
them as they were ; “ some day she will reproach me,” he 
said to himself. 

Perhaps some such vague dissatisfaction with himself moved 
Pygmalion, and some wish that he had left the marble, marble, 
came to him when for him alone the statue bent and blushed. 

To Ltoile, who knew herself well to be neither muse nor 


388 


FRIENDSHIP. 


saint, but only a woman to whom mere human joys had long 
been strangers, the happiness that he had brought her seemed 
worth the loss of life itself; love to the looker-on may be blind, 
unwise, unworthily bestowed, a waste, a sacrifice, a crime, yet 
none the less is love, alone, the one thing that, come weal or 
woe, is worth the loss of every other thing, — the one supreme 
and perfect gift of earth, in which all common things of daily 
life become transfigured and divine ; and perhaps of all the 
many woes that priesthoods have wrought upon humanity, 
none have been greater than this false teaching, that love can 
ever be a sin. To the sorrow and the harm of the world, the 
world’s religions have all striven to make men and women shun 
and deny their one angel as a peril or a shame ; but religions 
cannot strive against nature, and when the lovers see each 
other’s heaVen in each other’s eyes, they know the supreme 
truth that one short day together is worth a lifetime’s glory. 

Etoile, walking through the blue lilies of the grass in the 
warm air, listening for his step, looked back at her, past that 
had not known this joy with wonder and with pity. “ I 
thought I saw so clearly and so far in those old years,” she 
thought, “ and yet I never saw all that I missed.” 

“ Nay, dear,” said loris, with a smile, when once she said 
this to him, “ to give that insight the magician must come.” 

And he was glad and proud that he was that magician, and 
she let him see the power of his wand too much. 

“Since it pleases him to know his power, what matter?” 
she thought. “ I have been strong against the world, strong 
in my art and in my labors, strong to keep my armor bright 
in the contest with men. The world has called me too strong : 
I have earned the right to be weak.” 

He had been a slave so long, it pleased her to crown him a 
king. 

Even when he was tyrannous, capricious, or unjust, as a 
man in his love will often be, she bent her head to the yoke, 
and was silent and patient as Griseldis. “ He has suffered so 
much,” she thought. “ There is so much to efface for him, 
so much to be made up to him.” So she set herself to atone 
to him for the cruelty of another, as though it had been her 
own. 

When a word that might have seemed to him too vain, or 
too arrogant, sprang to her lips, she repressed it uns])okcn, lest 


FRIENDSHIP. 


' 389 


it should seem to bear any likeness of his tyrant in it. She 
wanted to give him back all the pride, the self-esteem, the 
dignity of thought, of which his mistress had so long robbed 
him : to strengthen his hands she effaced herself. 

She had been proud all her life. She gave him her pride, 
now, as she would have given him the kingdoms of earth had 
she had them. 

There is a story in an old poet’s forgotten writings of a 
woman who was queen when the world was young, and reigned 
over many lands, and loved a captive, and set him free, and, 
thinking to hurt him less by seeming lowly, came down from 
her throne and laid her sceptre in the dust, and passed among 
the common maidens that drew water at the well or begged at 
the city gate, and seemed as one of them, giving him all and 
keeping naught herself: “ so will he love me more,” she 
thought. But he, crowned king, thought only of the sceptre 
and the throne, and, having those, looked not among the 
women at the gate, and knew her not, because what he had 
loved had been a queen. Thus she, self-discrowned, lost both 
her love and her kingdom. A wise man among the throng 
said to her, “ Nay, you should have kept aloof upon your 
golden seat,, and made him feel your power to deal life or 
death, and fretted him long, and long kept him in durance 
and in doubt, you, meanwhile, far above. For men are light 
creatures as the moths are.” 

But Etoile had never read this story then, nor, had she seen 
it, would she have read the parable. 


CHAPTER XXXVL 

One summer day tidings came whose pain touched her even 
in her paradise, — the tidings that gentle, gracious, courtly 
Lord Archie had been drowned during a sudden storm, in 
which his pleasure-schooner had gone down, beating off the 
Isle of Jura, where he had been shooting on the moor. 

“ Dead !” said Etoile, with white lips : death seemed so 
impossible for that charming idler, that gentle wit, that grace- 

3a* 


390 


FRIENDSHIP. 


ful saunterer through the smooth and sunny ways of a philo- 
sophic life. 

“ Dead !” said loris ; and his eyes clouded and his brows 
grew dark, for he foresaw a darker shadow cast by this death 
across his own path. 

Lord Archie had been the sole fragile tie that had bound 
his daughter to any kind of truth or reason : before her father, 
falsehood always halted on her lips. Calm and indifferent 
though his habits were, his heart was loyal and his temper 
true. loris had always felt that the dead man had held his 
tigress in a manner in leash ; and now on his table in the 
offices in the Trastevere there was lying a passionate summons 
to him in cipher, flashed in lightning from his tyrant, crying 
to him from across the mountains and the sea, — 

“ Come to me come !” 

That day their solitude seemed less sweet ; even the sun- 
shine of the radiant painting-chamber seemed to grow dull ; 
clouds heaved up from the south and the east ; a sullen sirocco 
was blowing, and the golden hearts and blue eyes of the pas- 
sion-flowers were filled with the sand of the desert. 

“I cannot write to her?” said Etoile, and hesitated, and 
looked in his face. 

“ No,” said loris, abruptly, and was silent. 

She wound her hand in his. 

“ Would you let me write to her? — it seems heartless not 
to write, and I might tell her the truth of us, in some way, 
not to hurt her.” 

“No I” said loris. “ No ; I forbid you.” 

Her head drooped. She did not urge him ; she did not 
chafe against the tyranny of the words, because she fancied 
that such tyranny was sweet to him after long servitude. 

Those who know themselves strong can bear to be submis- 
sive. She was strong with the world ; she was only weak with 
him. 

He drew her arms about his throat : 

“ Ma femme ne pent pas icrire d ma maXtressef he mur- 
mured, in the language which they most often spoke. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


391 


CHAPTER XXXVIL 

One morning Etoile was in her painting-room. It was about 
ton o’clock, and fresh rains had cooled the air. In the fields 
beyond her gardens the people were at vintage ; their merry 
cries came to her mellowed by distance, with the laughter of 
the children and the heavy roll of the grape-wagons creaking 
down the vine-alleys. 

She had been working two hours. He was away in the 
city. Her painting had come forth from the canvas into 
life. 

And in the face of it she had given the fiice of loris ; and 
the work was delightful to her, — not now, as of old, for art’s 
sake, but for his. 

She had left oflf working for a moment and thrown herself 
on a low couch ; the sea-breeze came in through the passion- 
flowers and stirred the folds of her white linen dress and lifted 
the hair from her forehead ; the swallows were flying before 
the open casements. 

“ The summer will soon be going, so soon the summer will 
be a thing of the past,” she thought ; and the thought smote 
her with a sudden pang in the light, the fragrance, the still- 
ness that were round her. 

This one beloved sweet summer ! 

Shine the sun as it would, and bring forth its flowers and 
its joys as it might, no summer ever could be quite like this 
one which was fading. The vine-dressers beyond the trees 
were dancing and shouting with gladness because the grapes 
were ripe and the summer dying ; but each reddened leaf to 
her was a regret, each purpled cluster to her was a lament : 
the summer so soon would be dead. 

The summer that had had no precursor, that could have no 
successor, like itself. 

The door of the studio opened suddenly ; loris entered in 
silence, and quickly crossed the marble floor and threw himself 
beside her. He looked worn and very pale ; he knelt at her 
feet and covered her hands with kisses. 


392 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ My love, I must leave you 1” he murmured. “ I have to 
go to Paris ; I shall be absent only a little while, but — but ” 

Etoile thrust him backward with a sudden movement, in 
which all the blood, and life, and heart, and soul, that were in 
her, seemed to leap in flame to her cheek, and in lightning to 
her eyes. 

“ You are going — to her !” 

“ As I live I am not 1” cried loris ; and he rose, too, in as 
passionate a scorn as her own. “ What ! you insult me by 
thinking I would insult you, and follow that woman ! No, I 
go to Paris on a matter that concerns my honor, that is all ; 
to try and save something for all those who trusted me in this 
accursed Sicilian folly. As for her, she is in Scotland. How 
can you doubt me so ?” 

She caught his hands convulsively ; she grew as white as 
death. 

“ You will not go to her — ^you will not?” 

“ By my dead mother’s memory, if you wish, I will swear 
to you — No 1 By the heaven above us. No — ten thousand 
times.” 

She sank down in a passion of weeping, and piteously clung 
to ,him, whilst all the sweet glow of sunshine went round 
before her blinded eyes in rings of fire. 

“ Oh, my love, my life, why leave me ? Have I failed in 
anything? Am I in fault? Are you not happy? ” 

He kissed her eyelids, and raised her in his arms. 

“ We are too happy ! — the gods always grudge it. Do you 
think I would leave you for a little thing ? I must go for my 
honor. I must go to save those who trusted me ; there is no 
other way. Listen ; try and be calm ; I shall be back before 
our passion-flowers change color.” 

Then his voice faltered, and a quick sob caught his breath ; 
as he held her to his heart she felt the hot tears fall from his 
eyes upon her. 

Nor was he lying then. He spoke the truth as he meant 
it, as he saw it. It changed later on in his hands, as a gem 
that no man can control changes color. He had resisted the 
prayers of the absent woman who besought him ; he had let 
her entreaties beat themselves vainly on his deadness and 
deafness, like fretting waves on the beaten sand ; he had been 
irresponsive, and cold, and unmoved, as only a dead passion 


FRIENDSHIP. 


393 


that is buried in the charnel-house of disgust ever can be. 
But though the truth was still untold to her far away in the 
North, she had felt the chill, sickly shudder that runs through 
the hot leaping blood of the woman who is jealous — and 
forsaken. 

She had woven, she had spun, in the dust and the dark- 
ness of the great city ; she had pulled the threads ; she had 
woven like fate. 

He would not know whither he came, but he would come. 
She wove like fate. 

The irises of May had been in bloom when his tyrant had 
left him free. The white dahlias and asters of September 
were in bloom when he broke the spell of a joy too great to 
last, and went northward. 

The memories of those sweet, shining, sultry months lay 
like sleeping children in the heart of Etoile, and until thought 
itself should perish in her, they could never die. 

It is so much to have been once entirely happy ; never can 
it altogether pass away. 

Yet when he went it seemed to him that she died : the 
latter half of the old wise man’s prophecy began to realize 
itself as a cruel spell works slowly out on a doomed thing. 

She had utter faith in him. 

As he had sworn, so she was sure it was ; she never wronged 
him by the baseness of any disbelief. To doubt him would 
have seemed to her the foulest insult. 

When she touched the colors and the brushes, with which, 
all her life before, she had been able to summon spirits and 
angels at her will and forget the world around her, it was now 
only to endeavor to perfect his portrait or call the soft dark- 
ness of his eyes up on some blank piece of panel or of canvas. 
Then she would drop her brush wearily, and lean her head on 
her hands, and weep bitterly : bereft of him she was twice be- 
reaved, for with him also had gone her art.o 

A vague fear, too, lay forever on her, like a stone on a living 
blossom. 

She would not wrong him with any doubt of his fidelity ; yet 
he told her nothing; she could not tell what toils were not 
entangling, what dangers not encompassing, him. 

He had gone to save his honor : if his honor made ship- 
wreck ? 

E* 


394 


FRIENDSHIP, 


IMore than once she was sorely tempted to go also to Paris. 
It was her home ; she had a full and natural right to return 
there ; all her interests, indeed, were sutfering from her long 
absence. Yet she did not go ; she feared that it might seem 
to him as if she followed him, suspected him, spied upon him, 
importuned him. He had had too much of that weary insult. 
She would not wrong him so : therefore she stayed. 

The days and the weeks of that time were ever afterwards to 
Etoile, looking back on them, but a dull blank, a chaos of pain, 
such as the time of a great sickness seems in memory to the 
sick man looking back to it. 

She was herself ill in body, — so ill that physicians grew 
grave as they looked at her, and murmured of the Roman 
fever, and felt that there was some mental ill beside of which 
they knew not. 

She grew thinner, paler, weaker, every day, and every night 
wept more on her sleepless pillows ; and the last of the grape- 
harvest was gathered, and the last of the people’s songs sung, 
and the wind grew chill as they swept over bare fields, and the 
last of the passion-flowers faded and fell. 

One day a nightingale lay dead at the foot of the palms : a 
stray shot had stilled its song forever. 

A great hopelessness had fallen upon her. 

All her life long she had been brave, sanguine, and ready to 
smile at the worst enmity of the world or fate ; but suddenly, 
as a finely-strung bow may give way, she fell into utter lassi- 
tude and depression : a heavy despair seemed to weigh on her 
like a hand of ice. 

He had left her with tenderness, passion, grief ; but he had 
left her. 

To her it was like the fiat of their endless separation. 

‘‘ Where did I fail ?” she asked herself, with a sort of 
remorse, as though the fault were hers ; and her great love 
would not let har recognize that its own very humility, and 
strength, and depth, had been its foes. 

When loris had passed away over the mountains, he had 
gone looking back with dim eyes and aching heart indeed, 
but he had gone saying to himself, “ If she were never to 
behold my face again, she would never give herself to any 
other.” 

Had he not been so sure, so utterly sure, all the powers of 


FRIENDSHIP. 


395 


earth would not have made him leave her, even for his honor’s 
sake, or any other force or fate. But he knew that if he were 
to die that night, in body and soul would she be widowed 
forever, longing only for the kiss of death. Therefore he 
went secure. 

Such security is the divinest part of love. But oftentimes 
— alas ! it does but melt passion, as the fulness of the sun 
melts snow into water. 

She knew that he was well ; she knew that he was in Paris ; 
and she knew no more. She did not think that he was near the 
woman whom he had forsaken, because he had said that to 
think so was to dishonor him. 

Yet a darkness like the terrible blank of death seemed to 
her to have come between them. All her life seemed to go 
away with him. A delirious pain kept her sleepless through 
the nights ; a deadly apathy kept her motionless and powerless 
through the days, 

‘‘ Dead to use and name and fame,” 

now that the cruel charm was read. The dust gathered on the 
work she had begun, and the flies settled down on it undis- 
turbed. She never looked at it but once, and then wondered 
wearily was it she who had ever had the power to create ? 
Was it she who once had thought life too short and earth too 
small for Art ? She looked back on her dead self as on some 
other woman, whom she watched curiously and wondered at 
vaguely ; art ! — all the art of the world might have perished 
like a burnt scroll, and she would have cared nothing, had 
one life been beside hers. 

Which is the truth, which is the madness? — when the 
artist, in the sunlit ice of a cold dreamland, scorns love and 
adores but one art? or when the artist, amidst the bruised roses 
of a garden of passion, finds all heaven on one human heart ? 

Both are truth ; perhaps both are madness. 

But it were well to die in one of them, without waking to 
know ourselves mad. 


396 


FRIENDSHIP. 


CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

At four o’clock in that golden October day, when at Rocaldi 
the shot nightingale lay dead underneath the palms, the Lady 
Joan Challoner sat in a chamber in the Rue de Rivoli. Her 
heavy black garments were deep with crape and all the out- 
ward signs of woe, and the note-paper before her had black 
edges of the broadest and the saddest ; but on her face was a 
radiance of bronze of travel ; in her eyes was a shining smile 
of content. She was victorious. 

The transfer was effected past recall. 

And before her was seated loris. 

The room was small, and close, and gaudy ; a gilt clock 
ticked with feverish haste. The sun came in hot and glaring 
from the zinc roofs opposite the windows. loris, in the narrow, 
pent-up space and the stifling atmosphere, shuddered and felt 
stifled ; he looked worn and very ill. 

So he told himself, as ruined nations tell themselves so 
when, through their hesitation and their disorder, they are 
beaten in war. 

He had been betrayed and misled. 

He had been drawn on from one point to another by false 
hopes ; he had reached too late to change or arrest what he 
disapproved of; his endeavors had all been fruitless and his 
wishes overborne ; he had thought to save the interests of all 
those who had trusted him, and he found that he had only 
imperilled them. The mended pot was sent rocking down the 
stream, and his honor was embarked, a sad and trembling 
passenger, on that frail venture. 

He had come northward honestly believing that he came to 
retrieve the fortunes of a hapless enterprise, and he found that 
he had only fallen into the arms of a passionate and jealous 
woman. The inexorable pressure of circumstances had forced 
him whither he had sworn not to go ; the inexorable nets of 
obligation had drawn him into the very peril he loathed ; he 
had found himself face to face with her through business, — • 
only business, as she said to every one ; and his doom, like 


1 


FRIENDSHIP. 397 

that of the gold dropped in the sands and the Sea of Faro, 
was written. 

“ lo has come about the transfer,” she said to her relatives 
and her society. 

“ lo has come to me in my grief,” she said to her closer 
friends. 

Her husband left for the baths of Tauness, though it was 
late in the year. The new association for Faro sprang to light 
in the money-market and on the thick creamy paper of a 
brand-new prospectus. loris arrived too late to alter anything ; 
he found that he could do nothing save sign what she wished 
him. Lady Joan shook out her crape, and felt that she could 
have ruled empires had she been called to them. 

“ You do look so ill, lo,” she had cried to him, fondly, the 
first hour they met. “ That is all fretting for me. I will never 
leave you again, — never, never 1” 

He shuddered, and was silent. 

She believed what she said, and she meant what she said. 
In her hard, rough, cruel way she loved him, — as she saw 
love. 

None can give what they have not in them. 

They sat together now in the little, gilded, close room in the 
Paris hotel, and she was happy. He could not- escape her, and 
the transfer as a fact accomplished was before her sight in its 
printed prospectus. 

Paris was dull indeed, for it was out of the season, and in 
her heavy crape she could not go to amusements, laugh at 
theatres, or walk about at open-air concerts ; but it was always 
Paris, and she could go and dine at the cafes and drive by 
moonlight in the Bois, and walk about and see the shops, and 
divert herself in many ways : even crape suits have their uses. 
And he was here under her eye and hand, never to be let loose 
again until safe back in Fiordelisa. Later on that same night 
her jealous fears had assailed him. 

“ I hear you have been always with Etoile whilst I have 
been away,” she had said, suddenly, her eyes fastened on his. 

But loris, being well conscious of all that would be said to 
him, was impenetrably masked. 

“ I have seen her sometimes, of course,” he made answer. 

» Is that all ?” 

“ What more should there be ?” 

84 


I 


398 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ I heard there was a great deal more, — a great deal too 
much.” 

“ Believe what you like I It is the same to me.” 

“You are cruel, lor is I” 

“ It is you who are suspicious and odious !” 

“ To be called that after all I have slaved to do for you, all 
I have suffered this cruel summer 1” 

“ Why will you talk folly, then ?” 

“ Is it folly ?” 

“ Of course.” 

“ You have not been with her ?” 

“ Who can have told you 1 have?” 

“ Marjory told me.” 

“ She is a mischief-maker ; she is envious.” 

“ But Etoile is in love with you !” 

“ Bo not say such things to me of any woman : I do not 
like them.” 

“ It is true.” 

“ True or false, do not say it : it is unpleasant to me.” 

“ Will you swear to me you do not care about her, then ?” 

“ Why do you ask ? Can you not be satisfied ? Am I 
not here ?*’ 

She was satisfied ; and, being blinded and muffled in a vast 
vanity that prevented her from seeing anything that was not 
worship of herself, she never noticed that all these answers 
were but evasions ; they were none of them such denials — 
firm, frank, and fierce — as the man will give who, being faith- 
ful, is suspected of infidelity. 

But, though merely evasions, his conscience smote him 
heavily for their usage. He thought he was blameless in de- 
ceiving his tyrant, but he knew himself guilty in denying 
what adored him. 

He seemed to see the deep scorn flash from the tranquil, 
studious eyes of Etoile, — if she could know. 

“ It is only for a little while longer till all is clear,” he said 
to himself, as in the evening shadows of Fiordelisa he had 
said to himself. “ It will be easier to write the truth.” 

So he stayed on in Paris, and hated himself, and with 
every day that rose, said, “ I will tell her, and go to Rome 
alone to-night.” And every day passed with the truth still 
untold: the fatal, unnerving influence of a violent temper 


FRIENDSHIP. 399 

and a furious will had once more fallen on him, numbing all 
his strength. 

And another and a worse thing began to come to him : he 
began to be ashamed to go back to Etoile, ashamed to say to 
her, “ I have sinned and been faithless 1” 

He had made an effort to return alone ; had pleaded the 
end of the vintage, which needed the presence of its lord. 
But she had raised heaven and earth, and so moved all their 
forces that the formalities of business had bound him as the 
threads of the Liliputians the wrecked traveller ; and there 
were necessities for his presence in Paris weightier and more 
costly to break from than the necessities of the old classic 
custom of the grape-harvest at home. 

So he stayed, galled and fretted and half broken-hearted, 
knowing himself befooled, knowing himself a traitor, knowing 
himself unfaithful where his fairest faith lay, and sat in the 
gilded close room, with the zinc roof shining through the lace 
curtains of the window, and thought of cool palm shadows, of 
creamy daturas and blue passion-flowers, — of a white form 
moving slowly through the sunlit grass. 

Sometimes, when he could evade his tormentor’s vigilance, 
and leave her engrossed with some agent de change, or some 
artist, or some mirthful writer of indecent comedies, or any 
other of her numerous acquaintances, he would go by himself 
and look at the old house by the trees of the Luxembourg, 
which was still Etoile’s, and speak of her a little with the old 
people left in charge there. 

They let him enter once, and he sat down in the great 
wooden atelier opening on the garden, and felt as if her pres- 
ence were near him ; and when they uncovered a white bust 
that was of herself, and done by Clesinger, he turned from 
the sightle.ss eyes of the marble as one ashamed. 

At other times he would go in the academies and private 
palaces where her works hung, and study their power, and 
their color, and their classic grace, and feel his pulse beat 
more quickly as he thought : “ The woman who can create 
those only lives for me ; the muse that reigns here is but a 
fond and fragile thing to me, that trembles if she grieves me, 
that turns pale if I but frown !” 

And the sense of her power was sweet to him, because it 
lay like a dog at his feet. 


400 


FRIENDSHIP. 


But the moments when he was free to wander or to remem- 
ber them were rare to him, for his tyrant was niggard of his 
liberty and a miser over his very thoughts. 

Ever and again she would wound him with the thorn of 
some gross word, some wanton lie, some echoed calumny that 
she flung carelessly but brutally at the name of Etoile as a 
low hand throws a handful of mud against a marble statue, 
pleased to see the pure whiteness of it stained. He felt almost 
as base as she who threw it, since he did not raise his voice to 
save the outrage. 

“ She would die for me,” he thought to himself, “ and I, I 
have not the courage even to defend her from the senseless 
calumnies of jealous hate !” 

And he kept a sullen silence that his tyrant translated as 
indifierence, and, so translating, was content. 

About any name brighter, any powers higher, than those 
of the common mass of men and women, vile innuendoes, foul 
inventions, cowardly slanders always buzz and hover in the air 
as insects gather in the heat about the flower that bears most 
honey in its breast. A host of rumors was in the air about 
the name of Etoile, as about that of every other against whom 
could be charged the great guilt of excelling ; it was easy for 
another woman’s jealousy to gather them together and make 
a poison-cloud of them, and point to it and say, “ Look how 
heavy the cloud is, — how the stinging things cluster ; there 
must be corruption near !” 

And he longed to strike her on the mouth for her lie, yet 
could not, she being a woman. 

One night she had a comedian and an author to dinner with 
her in the Rue de Rivoli. They were persons she had known 
long ; they were men of mediocre talent and of dubious repu- 
tation, but they were useful to her, — had been useful, might 
be useful : she invited them once whenever she passed through 
Paris. 

The comedian had desired a part in that comedy in verse 
which had been one of the triumphs of Etoile. It had not 
been given him. The author had had a dramatic piece rejected 
at the great theatre where hers a little later had been so bril- 
liantly received. Both were of that second rank in the world 
of literature and art which is the most bitter enemy to the 
leading rank of that world that it possesses ; both had been 


FRIIINDSIIIP, 


401 


passed over by Etoile 'with that indiiSerence to their existence 
which was only carelessness in her, but which all took for 
pride. 

Lady Joan launched her name on the sea of their cigar- 
smoke when their dinner was done. 

They threw themselves on it as hounds on a deer. 

They tore it, they worried it, they strangled it, as the deer 
is torn, worried, and strangled ; only out of the malice of 
mediocrity ; but perhaps that is the most cruel malice that 
human life holds, because it is the most stupid. 

loris sat and heard — in silence. 

His tyrant watched him, but in vain. She caught no glance, 
she heard no word, that she could construe. He might have 
been deaf. 

When they rose to go, she bade him see them down the 
staircase of the hotel. 

He rose and obeyed. He even ushered them to the court- 
yard, and through the court- yard into the street, with an im- 
passible courtesy that flattered both very greatly. 

When they were fairly in the street under the midnight 
skies, he struck each by turn on the lips with a glove that he 
had been twisting in his fingers. 

“ Messieurs^ vous ties deux laches !” he said, very tran- 
quilly, a sombre light shining in his eyes that startled them. 

Then he turned on his heel and entered the hotel once 
more before either of them had recovered from his astonish- 
ment. 

He felt the first contentment that he had known since he 
had left. Rome. 

He waited within the next moining, expecting some mes- 
sage from them, but he received none. The next day he 
learned that the comedian had been arrested for debt, and the 
author for an offence of the press against decency. 

“ You have choice friends, ma chhre!'^ he said to the Lady 
Joan, who answered him sharply : 

“ They wrote me that you insulted them the other evening. 
What did you do that for, pray ? They are most excellent 
creatures, though a little imprudent and unfortunate.” 

“ They spoke too coarsely before you.” said loris, care- 
lessly. 

She smiled, well gratified. 

34 * 


402 


FRIENDSHIP. 


And you would have made a duel and a fuss about that, 
and compromised me! You must not do such things, lo: it 
is dangerous.” 

loris laughed aloud. 

She did not understand his laugh. 

She began dimly to fancy that she did not understand him, 
weak as water, docile as the silk to the hand that winds it 
though she had always deemed him to be. Still, she was con- 
tent. “How fussy and foolish he is still about she 

thought, in her happy conceit. “ The idea of being so angry, 
just for my sake, about nothing !” 

And she was vain and proud. 

Yet a certain sense of anxiety entered into her. She 
had always known him so docile and so patient to her com- 
mand. If alone, unknown to her, he could rise in such anger 
(though for her sake), what might he not do some day for his 
own ? 

For she knew very well that she had misled him to his 
hurt ; that she had dragged him where it was hard to walk in 
clean paths ; that she had exposed him to bitter misconstruc- 
tions and harsh obligations ; that one day he might resent and 
revolt : who could tell ? 

But, after all, did it matter ? She had him close and fast. 
If she made his fortune, gratitude must bind him forever 
to her ; if she had him ruined, necessity must keep him by 
her side. So she was content, and the days rolled on in 
Paris. 

These days were ghastly to him ; he loathed every hour of 
them, — from the long, dreary mornings filled with interviews 
and correspondence on a transaction that his intelligence mis- 
trusted and his conscience condemned, to the long, gaslit even- 
ings spent in a tete-a-tUe dinner in a cafe, a saunter through 
the crowded streets, a drive by the lake, a supper at a restau- 
rant, — all the old worn-out routine that seemed to him now so 
coarse, so common, so gross, so hateful. 

Every moment that passed by seemed to make him tenfold 
a traitor ; every night, looking up at the stars shining over 
the sea of gaslights in the Champs Elys6es, he thought of a 
woman in his own land whom the moonlight was finding out 
in her solitary chamber kneeling by her bed to pray for him, 
or lying sleepless with wet eyes for his sake. “ She loves me 


FRIENDSHIP. 


403 


so much, she 'will forgive even this,” he said to himself, and 
yet felt so base in his own sight for his faithlessness that it 
seemed to him he could never look her straightly in the eyes 
again. 

To his tyrant he did not think that he had sinned, but to 
Etoile he knew that he had. 

“ She loves me so much !” he thought ; and then his hand 
would loosen itself from his companion’s clasp, and he would 
move impatiently and thrust her away with a restless fretful- 
ness. 

“ You are very changed,” she said to him once. 

He answered her sullenly, — 

“ You have acted without me ; you have imperilled my 
name ; you have loaded me with fresh obligations. Can you 
expect me to be grateful ? Ho not make me scenes, for heaven’s 
sake !” 

And she was stilled and vaguely alarmed, for she knew in 
her own secret heart that she had brought ruin and him very 
near one to the other. 

True, the mended pot was swimming gayly down the stream 
among the bronze ones, but who could tell how long it would 
be afloat? She had done a clever thing, and she had put 
money in her purse, and she was rejoicing in her strength : 
still, like a cold wind, there came over her the consciousness 
that some day loris might rise in fury and reproach her as his 
ruin. 

The chill passed quickly off, the momentary spasm was soon 
still : she was not a woman to mistrust herself or to feel the 
heart-ache of a self-reproach. If matters turned out well, it 
was she who had made him do so ; if ill, why, then other 
people had been fools. And that was all. So she sat in the 
little, hot, gilded room and read her letters, and was fiercely 
glad and fiercely proud because she had woven her threads so 
patiently and well that there loris was beneath the autumn 
sun by her side in Paris. 

For a time there was no sound hut the ticking of the gilt 
clock and the scratching of her steel pen. loris was stretched 
upon a couoh ; his eyes were closed, his face was colorless and 
very weary. He was thinking, would it bo possible by any 
plea to escape alone and go to Rome that night ? 

Her writing finished at length, the Lady Joan lifted her 


404 


FRIENDSHIP. 


head and looked at him. She could not but see that he 
looked very ill and very fatigued, but it gratified her to see 
him so, because she took it as witness for his grief at her long 
absence from him. 

“ Poor lo, how silly he is !” she said softly to herself, the 
self-satisfied, vain smile of complete complacency breaking over 
her face and softening its harsher lines ; and she rose and 
leaned a little over him, and brushed a fly from oft' his low, 
broad brow. 

loris, startled, lifted himself with a sudden, quick movement 
from the cushions of the couch. As he did so, a letter fell 
from between his shirt and waistcoat. He caught it rapidly, 
but not so rapidly but what she had seen its superscription. 

“ That is the writing of Etoile !” she cried, and snatched 
his wrist and held his hand motionless. 

“ It is her writing,” she said, between her teeth. 

“ Give it me — do you hear me ? — give it me I” 

But he was more agile than she. 

He twisted his wrist out of her grasp, and with a rapid 
action tossed the letter on to the fire glowing in the open stove. 

It flamed in a moment ; in another moment it was but a 
few gray ashes on the wood. 

“ You have secrets from me ! She writes to you ! You 
dare !” 

The words hissed through the air about his head like a 
volley of arrows ; she screamed, she raved, she poured abuse 
and upbraiding from her lips in torrents of flame. 

“ You have secrets from me !” she cried once more in her 
fury. “ That woman loves you, writes to you ; you carry her 
letters in your breast — and I 

“ Oh, you traitor ! — you faithless coward !” 

Ilis face grew dark, and he looked at her one moment with 
a cold, pale rage, with an impulse which, followed, would 
have given him back his manhood and his peace. 

“ If I be faithless and a coward, I am the thing you make 
me” — the answer sprang to his lips, and with it all the truth. 

But once again was chance against him. 

The door of their sitting-room opened ; there entered one 
of her fellow-financiers fresh from the Bourse, where the 
shares of the new company were being liberally favored and 
purchased. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


405 


She choked her wrath into silence, as only finance could 
have had power to make her do, and, with lowering brows 
and eyes of flame, forced a smile for the bringer of good 
tidings. The financier was a Jew of Galicia; he was voluble 
and vivacious ; he had much to say, and was eager to say it ; 
he was inquisitive, and not delicate ; he stayed a long time, 
though he saw that the air he sat in was charged with a storm, 
and he was too important and too necessary to be lightly dis- 
missed or dealt with harshly. 

The face of loris had grown expressionless and unrevealing ; 
he had had time to stifle his impulse, to assume his mask. At 
his heart a sudden rage was eating, but he smothered it, and 
resumed a glacial graceful calm. 

When the door closed on their visitor, she flashed her glit- 
tering eyes of steel upon him. 

“ Now answer me, if you can, — if you dare ” 

“ I have no secrets of my own from you,” he answered her, 
chillily. “ But you must allow me to keep the secrets of 
others. I could not do less than burn the letter of any woman 
rather than have it read by any other, — even by you.” 

She looked at him savagely, question! ngly ; his eyes met 
hers with a cold, impenetrable serenity in their dark depths. 

lie had made up his mind to baffle her at any cost. lie 
succeeded. 

“ The secrets of others !” she echoed. “ You mean that 
she has a passion for you, and that you care nothing for her. 
Is that what you mean ? Is that why you burnt her letter?” 

loris was silent. 

Silence gives consent. 

“ You might have shown it to me,” she muttered. “ You 
ought to have shown it to me, whatever it was. To burn 
it ” 

“ The woman I love is the last that I could show it to, 
surely,” said loris, with his cold smile unchanged, and his eyes 
impenetrable. He could have laughed aloud at the ironical 
equivoque, even whilst every drop of blood in him burned 
with a sullen anger. But to her vanity and self-delusion the 
answer was a triumph and a joy. 

“ Then you admit she loves you ?” she cried, aloud. 

“ That is what I never admit of any woman, to either woman 
or man.” 


406 


FRIENDSHIP. 


His voice had a soft, icy chill in it ; his eyes had their 
changeless impenetrability. 

She herself screamed, and clapped both hands above her 
head. 

“ As if you didn’t admit it by that very answer to me ! 
Oh, you chivalrous ass, lo 1 — to give yourself all these grand 
airs and almost make us quarrel. What nonsense ! what 
stuff! I always saw she was scheming to entangle you. I 
always saw she was wild about you ” 

“ Hush, hush ! Is a ruined man such fine prey ?” 

“ E-uined ! you have Fiordelisa, and you are going to make 
your fortune through me. Besides, are you not always Prince 
loris ? I tell you I always saw her designs, — yes, the very 
first night she came to us. With all her wonderful talent she 
could not hide it from me. And to write to you unasked ! 
How unwomanly 1 how disgraceful ! You were fiir too con- 
siderate and too clement in burning her letter. What do such 
women deserve ? But how does she know you are here ?” 

A sudden awakening suspicion flashed freshly across her, 
and interrupted the flood of her just indignation and of her 
chaste disgust. 

loris still stood opposite to her, with his back to the light ; 
a more observant woman would have seen the strain in his 
calm, the rigidity in his expression, the enforced indifference 
and restraint ; but she observed none of them. She was not 
observant ; she was only suspicious. 

“ How could she know you were in Paris ?” she said, again. 

He answered, coldly, — 

“ No doubt it is known in Home. My servants ” 

“ Oh, if she is low enough to go to your servants !” cried 
his tyrant, — “ I dare say she does ; well, she will know you 
are with (she did not note the spasm that passed, and 
the rigidity of his features). “ She will know you are with 
me. How dare she write? how dare she?” 

“ Ghh'e^' said loris, with a smile whose bitterness escaped 
her, — “ chlre^ you forget ; our friendship, sweet though it 
was and sacred to me, is not a bond that the world respects 
very much : she may not understand its sanctity. That is 
possible.” 

“ Then she should be made to understand,” said Lady Joan, 
curtly. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


407 


loris was silent. 

“ The forward wretch, to dare to write!” muttered his com- 
panion, glaring longingly at the gray ashes in the stove : she 
felt that she would never wholly pardon him for burning that 
letter so before her very eyes. 

“ Let us go out for our drive,” she said, less demurely, “and 
as we go I will tell you all I heard of her from my dear, dear 
father, before he left us for that fatal cruise. We will dine up 
at Madrid ; the nights are so fine ; and a pale moon still. 
Nobody will recognize me with my veil on, will they?” 

The hours that followed were sickly as hours of fever to 
loris- 

The dusty roads, the seared and reddening trees, the passage 
by the lake, so difierent from what he had known it when the 
Second Empire was in its gilded glory, the dinner at Madrid, 
the cigars on the wooded boulevard, the garden where the 
gaudy dahlias were dying and the creepers were faded and 
seared, — they were all loathsome to him. He hated the flare 
of the lights ; he hated the smell of the smoke ; most of all 
he -hated himself. 

“ I am faithless, — faithless 1” he said to his conscience ; and 
his conscience echoed, “ Faithless.” 

It seemed to him that the moon-rays slanting in through 
the balcony windows seeing him would find their way to the 
charmer in Home, and say to her, “ Charm no more ; he is 
faithless to you.” 

It was for this that he had left her 1 this exhausted mockery 
of grace ; this shame and satire of passion ; this gross gro- 
tesque unlovely union of violence, of voluptuousness, of mer- 
cenary greed and guile 1 The white rays of the moon seemed 
to pierce him like Ithuriel’s spear. 

They saw him here. 

They saw her where she slept in Rome. 

He was disgusted with himself. 

He felt himself scarcely higher or nobler than the man 
whom he had struck on the mouth with his glove. 

He had surrendered her to the violence and coarseness of a 
jealous woman. 

He had let a base and unreturned passion be imputed to 
her and had held his peace. 


408 


’FRIENDSHIP. 


and had not lifted his hand to pluck it off, nor lifted his heel 
to stamp its poisonous, flat, hissing head lifeless forever. 

Moreover, he said to his conscience, “ It is only for a little 
■while ; a few da^^s more *’ 

In vain ; for he knew that he should have strangled the lie 
at its birth ; that he should have risen and said manfully to 
his tyrant, — 

“ I am yours no more ; I am hers forever.” 


CHAPTER XXXIX. 

It was a cheerless day in the late autumn, and Rome was 
drenched with chilly dusky rains, dark and dreary and de- 
pressing, swept with high winds, and overhung with mist and 
cloud. 

It was six o’clock in the grim old palace by the Forum 
Trajano ; it was the first day of the rites of the Bona Dea and 
of the gathering of the incoming spinsters and dowagers in 
that holy quarter. All the matrons and virgins of the Invio- 
late Isle and of the Free Republic had not yet arrived in 
Rome, but many had done so ; many had come thither that 
dark, drear afternoon to partake of the tea that was purifica- 
tion, and the muffin that was a voucher. 

The religious rites were over ; only two or three of the 
familiars of the place were lingering: they were Mr. Silverly 
Bell, and Mrs. Macscrip, and the maiden lady who had 
written so learnedly on the penalties and the privileges of 
vestals. 

They still stood round the fire, conversing. 

“ Is she still here?” said Mrs. Macscrip. 

Still here,” said Mr. Silverly Bell. 

“ Taken that beautiful place that is called Rocaldi ?” 

“ Yes, and the rooms by the Rospigliosi also. It must 
cost a great deal to live as she does.” 

“ How does she do it? How can she do it?” 

“ Ah, how, indeed ? No capital, you know. Makes money, 
certainly; makes money; but what is that?” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


409 


“ Why doesn’t she go back to Paris ? She has a house 
there, they say, and one would think all her interests ” 

“ Ah !” Mr. Silverly Bell smiled first, and then sighed 
very deeply. 

“Artists are all alike 1” said Mr. Silverly Bell, with a tender 
regret over the sad shortcomings of genius. 

“ I hope we shall never meet her any more in society,” said 
the author of the “ Privileges and Penalties,” and she shud- 
dered between each word. 

“ Not likely,” said Mr. Silverly Bell, with another sigh, and 
took a letter out of his pocket. 

“ Here is a little portion I can read to you without any 
violation of confidence, and written me a few weeks ago by 
our dear absent friend ; what her poor father said to her before 
he went on that fatal cruise to Faro ; he could never express 
himself with sufiicient indignation at its ever having been 
imagined possible that he ever could have presented her to 
Lady Joan. It is all very sad.” 

And he read the extract from the letter in a low mellow 
voice, with a touching melancholy accent. 

“ My poor father told me a few days before he left for that 
fatal cruise that he never had known her at all, except just as 
men do know women of no character ; going in and out of 
studios and seeing her — when the Salon opened. He could 
not be furious enough at its ever having been dreamt that he 
could have ever sent her to me! You may contradict it 
everywhere. My father always thought the worst of her. I 
believe her very pictures are not her own.” 

“ Is it not sad ?” said the reader again, as he finished. 

“ Poor dear Lady Joan !” said Mrs. Macscrip. “ Infamous 
indeed ! To abuse her hospitality in such a manner I But 
she is so sweetly confiding.” 

“ Yes, so fatally frank herself, you see. She never has a 
suspicion of evil.” 

“ A beautiful character 1” 

“ Most noble, yes. But sure to be abused.” 

“ Sure to be,” echoed Mr. Silverly Bell, “ and its kindness 
traded on. She should have thought, inquired, been more 
cautious, before receiving a person merely recommended to 
her by so notoriously bad a man as the Baron Voightel, — a 
great man indeed, as we all know, but an excessively unscru- 
s 35 


410 


FRIENDSHIP. 


pulous one. A man may discover a continent and yet be unfit 
for all the decencies of ordinary life.” 

“ All 1” the ladies sighed with him, and old Lady George, 
straining her deaf ear to hear as she knitted, muttered over 
her lamb’s- wool, — 

“ Bad ? le cannibal ! I have heard him confess that he ate 
human flesh, and preferred it to butcher’s meat. He told me 
so.” 

“ If that were all,” said Mr. Silverly Bell, gently, “ one 
might conceive the horrible agonies of hunger in shipwreck 
driving a man even to such frightful extremity as that. But 
in cold blood, in every-day life, to introduce a notorious adven- 
turess to a noble and blameless lady ” 

“ Can you call a great artist an adventuress ?” said sleepy 
Lord George, with a gleam of humor shining in his watery 
dim eyes. 

“ It is an expression,” said Mr. Silverly Bell, hastily. “ A 
common expression. A usual expression. When one knows 
nothing of a person, of whence they came, of how they 
exist ” 

“ Etoile banks at Hettinger’s. I wish I did,” said Lord 
George, with a little sad mirth in the twinkle of his eyes. 

“ If she have taken a fancy to loris I think he is very much 
to be envied : I wish I were he. What does he go away for? 
He is a silly fellow if he don’t know his good fortune.” 

“Good fortune!” echoed Mr. Silverly Bell, in horror. “My 
dear sir, excuse me, are you mad ? What worse could happen 
to our charming but too vacillating friend than to fall into the 
power of an unscrupulous woman, of a genius who ” 

“ You think an unscrupulous woman without genius better? 
Well, to be sure he has got that now,” muttered Lord George, 
fumbling for his snuff-box. But his daughters stifled the 
atrocious words in their screams. 

“ Papa, how can you 1 How dare you ! Of course you 
only say it for fun ; but still ” 

Lord George shuffled off into an inner room out of the 
storm. Mr. Silverly Bell resumed, — 

“ Who, because she only understands the baseness of lawless ' 
passions herself, is utterly incapable of comprehending the 
purity and intensity of a simple friendship, such as a woman 
that is all mind takes delight in ; a woman that is all mind 


FRIENDSHIP. 


411 


never thinks of the misconceptions that her innocence and 
noble actions may be open to. Lady Joan is all mind. She 
has done the most wonderful things in London and Paris ; 
entirely saved the whole Messina affair from ruin by her energy 
and promptitude ; it is impossible to say what the shareholders 
do not owe to her ; and then just because a mere friend, who 
is a director of the affair, has naturally to go over to Paris to 
negotiate a loan with Erlanger or Rothschild (I think it is 
Rothschild), foul-mouthed people pretend that he is gone over 
for her ; that he is her lover ; that — oh, it is disgusting, quite 
disgusting 1” said Mr. Silverly Bell, breaking off with eloquent 
abruptness as his feelings grew too strong for his habitual 
suavity. 

Prim and proper little Mrs. Macscrip stroked his arm con- 
solingly. “ Dear Mr. Bell, do you suppose anybody worth 
thinking twice about ever dreams of anything wrong with 
dear frank Lady Joan and dear good Mr. Challoner? Im- 
possible ! — quite impossible 1” 

“ If all the world were as excellent as Mrs. Macscrip, it 
would be impossible,” said Mr. Silverly Bell, gallantly. “ It 
should be impossible, even foul-mouthed as the world is,” he 
said, more bitterly. “ But she is all mind, and she forgets 
that a base tongue always attributes a base motive. She was 
utterly annoyed to see loris in Paris. She tells me so. He 
went over quite unexpectedly on a telegram from Erlanger 
or Rothschild (I think it was Rothschild), and of course he 
went to see her : what more natural, with such business in- 
terests as theirs are in common? But a mere simple thing 
like that is enough for calumny !” And tears suffused the 
gentle pale eyes of Mr. Silverly Bell. 

At that moment in from a bedchamber adjoining came the 
youngest daughter : she was excited and eager, even more than 
her wont, and her thin features were quivering with agitation. 

“ A telegram from dearest Joan,” she said, breathless with 
emotion, “ from Perugia. She arrives to-night, in an hour’s 
time 1 We are all to meet her.” 

“ Delighted 1” murmured Mr. Silverly Bell, a little envious. 
“ I will go also. Seven o’clock, — the train from Mont Cenis, 
I think ? Is it Mont Cenis ? Did you know she was coming 
so soon ? She wrote me next week.” 

“ She meant to have waited till next week. She does not 


412 


FRIENDSHIP. 


say what has hastened her. She only says, ‘ Meet me, seven 
to-night.’ Dearest Joan 1” 

“ You must go and get ready, dears: I might take you in 
my landau,” said Mrs. Macscrip, who was always good-natured 
to quite proper people. 

“ Oh, no : that would detain you too long, and we are too 
many, thanks so much,” said Maijory, fluently. “ Mr. Bell 
will get us a cab ; Mr. Bell will escort us. Dear Joan 1 You 
can understand my delight, I am sure. We have not seen her 
since May I An eternity I Dear Joan. And after such grief 
as she has had, too 1” 

Then the guests took their leave, and Mr. Silverly Bell 
poured himself out a weak cup of tea and talked to Lady George 
about her knitting, and the Scrope-Stairs daughters went and 
robed themselves in waterproofs and thick veils, and went out 
into the misty rain and howling winds with their escort. And 
the heart of one of them beat high. 

“ I hope she is not all alone, you know,” she said to their 
escort. “ I do hope she is not all alone. I should think loris 
is sure to have come with her.” 

“ Oh, I should think so,” answered Mr. Silverly Bell. 

Challoner being still away in Germany, they would not let 
her travel alone with her maid. Naturally he will have re- 
turned with her ; most naturally.” For Mr. Silverly Bell, in 
his way as a friend, was quite priceless, — unless he quarrelled 
with you : until he quarrelled with you he would see you 
through anything, with his smile and his sigh at your ser- 
vice. 

Marjory never felt the streaming rain, the piercing winds. 

In her own familiar way she was triumphant, vicariously 
she was victorious ; for she was sure that loris was returning, or 
else never would her friend be coming over the mountains. 

He would not be hers, indeed, but she felt that to see him 
in the old worn fetters tread the old dull paths would be al- 
most happiness compared with the agony of the summer which 
had seen him pass to new joys, where the passion-flowers em- 
braced the palms. The woman who enslaves herself loves a 
prisoner, can bear her fate whilst daily she can see him behind 
his bars pacing to and fro his joyless cell ; but when release 
comes, and the ship of good tidings bears him free over the sea 
to fresh joys under fairer skies, — then, then indeed she knows 


FRIENDSHIP. 


413 


bitterness. Unless she be a noble woman ; and Marjory Scrope 
was not noble. She had betrayed the captive’s flight ; she had 
locked the chains anew about his feet, that so at least she 
might keep him in her sight and still the hunger of her aching 
heart. 

She was a merciless, jealous, envious woman, but, being a 
maiden of good name and good society, she did not let these 
cruel passions rise to the surface to be seen of men ; instead, 
she cloaked herself in waterproof and friendship, and hastened 
through the foggy, rainy night to meet her dearest Joan. The 
train was late ; the night was very cold and wet. Mr. Silverly 
Bell, despite the warmth of his rejoicing, shivered as he paced 
the stone floor of the waiting-hall ; but Marjory was burning 
hotly with the fever of hope and the joy of success. She 
strained her ear, she strained her eyes ; her heart beat quickly, 
her pale, waxen features flushed. 

“ I do so long to see her, darling Joan !” she said, with 
breathless lips. The bells clanged, the doors were thrown open, 
the throng of travellers poured out in the gaslight and mist, 
in the gloom and the rain. Foremost among the crowd she 
saw gray eyes like steel, a fla.sh of white teeth, a sunbrowned 
face with a crape veil tossed from above it. As she threw her 
arms about the advancing form and welcomed her, her eager 
glance saw another face in the shadow farther back, — a face 
pale, cold, very weary, the face of a proud man, unwilling and 
ashamed. 

Then Marjory said in her heart her psalm of praise. 

The fetters were fresh locked. 

“ Are you all here, dears ? — and darling St. Paul too ?” 
cried Lady Joan. “ How good of you, such an awful evening 
as it is ! Ah, yes, my grief, — such grief indeed ! lo, have 
you got my jewel-case safe ? The tickets ? — oh, lo has them.” 

So she returned in triumph. 

Who would ask her what she had done in Paris ? Who 
would mind how she had returned, or with whom ? Who 
would dare to comment on her travels, since she had the wit 
to be met at the station by these irreproachable maidens and 
their venerable and venerated escort? 

Other women might find such a journey from Paris land 
them in endless troubles and obloquy, but she knew how to 
make such adventures innocent as milk and harmless as a dove, 
35 * 


414 


FRIENDSHIP. 


only by sending a telegram, — one telegram, that had cost her 
a franc ! 

Society is often bought cheaply, but not often so cheaply as 
that. 

“ Tue-la !” cries a famous writer, preaching the old, natural, 
just crusade of man against the faithless wife. 

“ Tae-la His guenon de Noe grins from one of her small 
ears to the other at the absurd, antiquated notion as she troops 
with hundreds like her through Society, applauded, welcomed, 
well content, smiling complacently in the face of a world that 
smiles complacently at her. 

“ Tue-la r Why, she laughs aloud. Who should kill her ? 
Her husband ? Behold him as he comes meekly in her wake, 
joking good-humoredly with the person by whom, in barbarous 
ages, he might have imagined himself injured! Society? 
She caresses Society, and Society kisses her in return on both 
cheeks. The Ape of Noah might be the Dove of Noah, for 
the olive-branches that she offers and sees accepted. 

“ Kill her 1” The law has been re-written. 

Far away is the day when, in old Judea, they led such 
women as she out under the meridian sun and bared them 
naked and stoned them to death in the sight of the people, so 
that their name should be a byword and a reproach through 
all the land. 

The law has been re-written. 

The Ape of Noah may smile against the sun ; she may sit 
in the seat of honor : men shall praise and women salute her 
with a kiss ; for her there is no need of night and darkness ; 
she may take her pleasure in peace and pride, and no voice 
shall arraign her ; and at the banquets of her world the man 
whom it pleases her to choose from others shall be summoned 
beside her in tender forethought of her fond desire. 

“ Kill her 1” The re-written law says to her, — 

“You shall enjoy the sum and substance of all vice; you 
shall draw your lover within your chamber whilst your child 
sleeps against the chamber wall ; you shall be guilty, and your 
world shall know your guilt ; yet if your lord be only as base 
as you, all things shall go well with you, — you shall say you 
enjoy the shibboleth of ‘ friendship,’ and the world will let you 
say it and receive you.” 

True, if you were not guilty, but only took pleasure in 


FRIENDSHIP. 


415 


counterfeiting a guilt you had not, you would be a still poorer 
and more contemptible thing even than you are now ; true, if 
it were as you say, and you were innocent, you would be the 
very fool of fools to play thus upon the house-tops the antics 
of a sin you have not ; true, turn you which way you will, you 
must be either the silliest or the basest of all women. 

But you are many in number, and you agree to stuff your 
shibboleth down the yawning throat of your world, and you 
are strong by reason that you have so many sisters ; and so 
you turn the face of the world to you and set it smiling, as he 
who keeps the key of a clock sets the hands of the clock to 
noonday. The day of passion is dead, — dead with the old 
heroic ages ; the day of devotion has fled away to the dream- 
land of poets ; the day even of sin that was honest has passed 
as a foe too frank. 

Your day has dawned, and is at its meridian, — the day of 
lust that folds its arm within prudence, of pale love that is 
hidden in the warm cloak of convenience. 

When the day of truth comes, where will you be ? 

In your grave, with marble Virtues weeping over your name 
in letters of gold. For the law has been re-written. 


CHAPTER XL. 

It was night, and Etoile sat alone. 

The lamps had been lighted, and shed a mellow glare over 
the great room, the pale busts and white marbles, the dusky 
outlines of powerful sketches in charcoals, the green drooping 
fronds of palms and ferns, and the faint soft hues of old frescoes. 

The unfinished picture of the Sordello stood on a great oak 
easel, untouched since the day that loris had left her ; only 
one thing was perfected in it, and that was the face of the 
poet : the face there was that of loris. 

She sat alone, doing nothing. For the first time in all her 
life, her hours were empty, — came without welcome, departed 
without use. Those full rich studious days that before she 
had known him had always seemed too short, and never had 
one vacant moment that was not sweet through labor or through 


416 


FRIENDSHIP. 


dreams, how far away they seemed ! dead as the dead birds 
that she had buried in her childhood under the green leaves 
in green Ardennes. 

“ Oh, my love, my love 1 what you have cost me 1” she 
thought, with the scalding tears rushing to her eyes ; yet even 
though he had cost her a hundredfold more bitter pangs she 
would not but have had his life cross hers : she never for one 
instant wished that they had never met. 

To have been happy once : it is so much. Well, is he who 
made us so pardoned the after cruelty or pain. 

The winds roared angrily without through the yellowed 
passion-vines whose flowers were dead. The rains beat on 
the long grass, and the leafless boughs against the wooden 
shutters. 

There was an ebon crucifix in the dusk beyond the lamp- 
light ; above it hung the first portrait she had ever made of 
him ; she kneeled there and wept bitterly, and prayed for him. 

The door unclosed gently. 

He came into the shadow, and thence into the light. He 
was pallid as death, weary, worn, ashamed. She looked up 
and saw him through the mist of her tears ; with a great cry 
of unutterable joy she sprang to him. 

For a little while he loosened his arm from about her and 
sank down at her feet. 

“ You are the angel of my soul 1 What can I say to you? 
Will you forgive?” 

She leaned her hands upon his shoulder as he kneeled there, 
and thrust him backward : gazing on his face, she felt as if a 
knife had pierced her heart. 

“ You have been with her?” 

The words were so low they seemed to stifle her as she 
spoke them. 

His face drooped till it was hidden on her knees. She 
knew then that he had sinned against her. He knew then 
that to have been faithless to her was the darkest infidelity of 
all his life. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


417 


CHAPTER XLI. 

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of the 
fulling r^in in the darkness without. His arms were still 
about her, his face still buried on her knees. 

“ Can you forgive ?” he muttered, at length. “ Hear, I 
saw the brute. I never meant to go to her. I was deceived, 
misled, drawn on where I loathed to be. When I left you I 
never foresaw what she would do. I have sinned against you, 
but never with my heart.” 

She put his arms away from her, and lifted her head with 
a sense of suffocated pain. 

“ You have been with her,” she echoed once again. She 
felt as if her own lips were polluted, as if her own life were 
full of unutterable shame, and scorn, and outrage. 

A man cannot perhaps know all that a woman suffers from 
his infidelity. Hers to him may wrong his pride and his pas- 
sions with a great agony, but it cannot seem all at once to 
bring intense humiliation, intense desecration, personal and 
spiritual, with it as does his to her. It cannot make him 
ashamed to exist, as it makes her. 

Moreover, he has his vengeance: she is helpless. “You 
have been with her !” she repeated : and had the knife been 
truly in her breast, it would have hurt her less than this. 

“ I have confessed it,” he muttered, wearily. “ Men are 
weak and vile ; we are not worth a thought. All the while I 

have hated myself, and yet My angel, look at me ! Do 

not look like that ! You frighten me, Etoile 1” 

“ Your angel ! And you could !” 

A flush overspread her face ; then she grew deathly pale ; 
she strove with trembling hands to put his hands away from 
her ; she could not endure that he should touch her ; a dull 
confused murmur seemed surging in her ears ; she felt faint 
and blind. 

Then all at once the bands of pain at her heart seemed to 
loosen ; a great sob rose in her throat ; she shook from head to 
foot, she shrank away from him and wept bitterly, 
s* 


418 


FRIENDSHIP. 


loris gathered her weeping thus in his arms, and kissed her 
on her closed eyelids. 

“ She will forgive me now,” he thought. “ If she would 
not forgive me she would not weep. Women that are vain 
and are hard do not grieve ; they avenge.” 

And his sin seemed slight to him because it was pardoned. 

“ Are the passion-flowers dead, dear ?” he said, caressingly. 
“ Well, they will bloom another summer, and they will find 
your love and mine lovelier than ever, will they not? My 
treasure, why will you weep so ? I am here with you once 
more. And you forgive me? — ah, yes, you forgive me: you 
are one of the women that forgive. You would kiss my hand 
if it stabbed you !” 


CHAPTER XLII. 

Meanwhile in the Turkish room Lady Joan was smoking. 
All the racket of hasty arrival, all the disorder of long travel, 
were about her, but she was happy. She had come back suc- 
cessful. Who can want more than success ? Tongues were 
going gayly around her; Mimo sat on the sofa beside her, 
and Guido Serravalle on a stool at her feet ; Marjory Scrope 
was making her tea, and Mr. Silverly Bell was arranging her 
lamps. 

“ lo’s gone to his own house with a headache,” she said to 
her companions ; but it did not disturb her : the transfer was 
made, and he was safe back in Rome. “ He has always had 
headache after a journey ; and it certainly was very cold 
coming over the mountains.” 

She herself had no headache, nor any ills at all. She never 
had, unless it were desirable at any moment to appear an in- 
valid ; she was bronzed, bright-eyed, animated, amicable, even 
gay beyond her wont, still she remembered she was in mourn- 
ing. She was glad to be home again ; glad to have managed 
so well ; glad to have brought her captive in her train ; glad 
to shine in the lamplight before the eyes of her adorers as a 
very Semiramis of Finance. loris was absent indeed ; he was 
sullen, cold, unwell, but that was not of very much conse- 


FRIENDSHIP. 


419 


quence ; she had had him with her in Paris ; she had brought 
him with her to Rome ; that was all that really mattered : she 
was even glad he was away ; she had so many teacups and 
triptychs to account for with Mimo, and tuneful Guido was a 
sillier young goose than ever as he sat at her feet. 

“ You were quite wrong about all that,” she took a moment 
to whisper to her watch-dog. “ Oh, yes, you were, dear, quite 
wrong ; he cannot endure her : she persecuted him, — actually 
wrote to him in Paris ; would you believe it?” 

The pallid skin of Marjory Scrope flushed painfully. 

“ Are you sure ?” she said, nervously. 

“ Sure ? Do you think anybody can ever deceive me ?” 

“ But indeed ” began her poor watch-dog. 

He cannot endure her,” said Lady Joan, clinching the 
matter. “ He tore her letter into shreds before me, he was so 
disgusted. lo has no secrets from me, you know, — no more 
than he would have had from a sister.” 

Marjory kissed her with effusion. 

“ So glad to have you home, darling !” she murmured ; for 
indeed she felt that here was a jailer from whom no escape 
would be possible for the prisoner, whom she herself could 
only see if he remained behind the bars of his prison-house. 
She was cerkiin that her lynx-eyed friend was blinded ; she 
could not herself forget those summer evenings when the 
shadow of loris had passed under the palms, and she had seen 
him so pass herself, watching under the cestus shrub of the 
open plains. She could not forget, and she was not deceived. 
But she forbore to press her convictions home. What her 
friend chose to ignore she would ignore also ; what she chose 
to impute she would impute likewise. She had supreme faith 
in her friend’s power to hold and keep, — faith so great that 
she kissed her in all sincerity. 

The jailer was so much better than the bark of good tidings 
that would bear him away to far and free countries 1 

Marjory, going home in the blowing wind and rain' that 
night, felt a dull yet flerce pleasure stir at her heart. She was 
quick to catch a clue, she was swift to follow a hint, and she 
was cruel as unloved and unlovely women are. 

This woman whom she hated, this muse whom she envied, 
this cold and careless celebrity who could sit amidst her flowers 
doing nothing, this stranger whom loris loved, was to be called 


420 


FRIENDSHIP, 


the fool of a hopeless passion ! The vengeance was sweet to 
this lone maiden whose own hopeless passion had been the 
mockery of her little world. She did not know how the lie 
was to be fastened, how the story was to be told ; but she had 
firm faith in her friend and in her powers of falsehood. 

“ Joan will separate them,” she said to her own sick heart, 
with a cruel joy, going home in the beating rain. She herself 
could only wait, as echo waits till it is summoned. 

For the few next succeeding days Lady Joan was in a whirl 
of business and contentment. There was a multitude of things 
to see after and arrange, — all the threads to be taken up that 
bound the Temple of all the Virtues to Mimo’s shop and 
Trillo’s studio ; Mrs. Grundy and Mrs. Candor to be called 
on and propitiated, lest they should see anything odd in that 
Paris sojourn and homeward journey ; all the winter’s cam- 
paign through Society to be thought over and mapped out; 
and, beyond all, the newly-painted pot to be set on high, with 
its glittering charms gleaming on its glaze. 

The pot would not long hold water, — no mended pot ever 
does ; but it looked very well and made a beautiful effect, and 
that was all that was wanted. On the whole, on these first 
days of her return she was more than even satisfied, — she was 
brilliantly triumphant. 

Yea, while at least the affairs of the bridge were going on 
again, and the crabs and the barnacles were having more 
planks driven into their native waters to become their home 
in due time. True, the Societii, Inglese-Italiano — be it under 
whatever name it might — was much like that famous knight 
of woeful story who, whether he ran in doublet of blue, or 
red, or green, ran always equally ill and tilted direfully. The 
brass plate on the modern door in the old palace down in 
Trastevere had its inscription altered from that of the Ponte 
Calabrese- Siciliano to that of the Promatrice delle Communi- 
cazione Italiane-Africane, and the prospectus read quite dif- 
ferently, and Tunis came into it, and much was made of the 
mails from Malta ; and altogether it was quite a new thing — 
to look at ; but underneath it remained very much the same, 
as a lady’s face does under the paint and the pearl powder. 
Mr. Challoner was to keep his crook and sit at his handsome 
desk when he liked ; the old shareholders were to get nothing 
indeed, but the new ones were to get everything, — make their 


FRIENDSHIP. 


421 


fortunes, in point of fact ; and as any old shareholder could 
become a new one if he liked to buy new shares, what, in 
heaven’s name, had he to complain about ? His money was 
gone down in the sand among the crabs and the barnacles, and 
the winds and the waters alone were responsible for that mis- 
fortune. If the old shareholder would not buy a dredger to 
get it up again in the shape of fresh shares, it was clearly his 
own fault if it remained at the bottom or if the more enter- 
prising new shareholder dredged for it. So at least Lady 
Joan said, and she knew all about these things, and had dwelt 
in the Land of Goshen, where money is always going down in 
the sand. 

loris was bitterly dissatisfied and disquieted indeed, and the 
Duke of Oban had withdrawn himself in a fury and fume, 
and nasty people said that the old shareholders would have 
still demanded an inquiry in public tribunals only that they 
were loath as timid human beings are to throw good money 
after bad. But loris never understood anything (at least, so 
she said) ; and old Oban was a muff" and an idiot ; and the 
old shareholders might bluster till they were hoarse, — it was 
all their own fault if they would stand still and scream, instead 
of coming dredging again as they might do. So she settled 
everything to her own complete satisfaction ; and when she 
was satisfied herself, she was not overmuch given to heeding 
the dissatisfaction of others. 

The new dredgers would go on dredging for a few years, 
and the engineers would go on driving new piles in to please 
the crabs, and Tunis would always be on the horizon and 
Malta on the sea ; and if the new shareholders could not make 
the bridge stand or the mails come and go by it, it would be their 
own fault, — in the future ! Nobody would be responsible ex- 
cept the sea. When the tides are against you, you can always 
come into court with a clear conscience and quote Canute 
(Knut, as we are told we ought to write it). She was always 
quoting Canute now, and could always do so equally here- 
after. 

No speculation is infallible,” she would say. “ No one 
can be perfectly sure that they have Providence and all his 
in-and-outs on their side. One can only do one’s best to 
succeed.” 

After all, it does not very much matter whether you succeed 
8G 


422 


FRIENDSHIP. 


or not, when you arc only that blessing of Providence, — a 
promoter. 

Besides, Lady Joan was beginning to think that a little 
touch of ruin might not be altogether disadvantageous. Not 
such ruin as ends in baililFs and no dinner to eat ; not real 
ruin such as some of those silly shareholders were screaming 
about as their fate; but a little touch of political ruin, or 
rather retrenchment. It would look well, as if one had sacri- 
ficed a good deal in driving the piles in the sand, so she 
meditated, — as if one also had been a victim to the tides and 
the winds. Besides, if one had to retrench, one might have 
to live altogether at Fiordelisa: why not? The great old 
house was full of sun and had carpets. On the whole, she 
was not sure, if necessary, that she would not prefer to be 
ruined a little. She was a clever woman, and could draw 
usefulness out of everything, as one gets good olives out of 
old rags. 

So that she was in high spirits in this rough rainy weather 
that followed her return to Rome. Her husband had not yet 
come over the mountains ; her slaves and courtiers were all at 
hand about her ; her mourning was useful, for it evoked so 
much sympathy, and some people out of sympathy called on 
her that had not called before ; night and day she was busied 
with the new shares and the new agencies and the new enter- 
prise : she was in paradise. loris held himself aloof indeed ; 
loris seemed dull and cold and grave, said he was unwell, left 
her to herself very much ; but what of that ? He had chosen 
to sulk about the transfer : let him 1 He could not alter it ; 
and he would recover his temper in time, so she said. Mean- 
while there was Douglas Grraeme fresh from chamois-hunt- 
ing, and Gruido Serravalle eager to sing the same songs, and 
Mimo and Trillo, those Tyndarids of art, both ready to run 
about with her into Society, east and west. Lady Joan was 
happy. 

Was she going to make herself miserable because loris 
sulked in a corner and accused her of having jeopardized his 
honor ? Not she ! He might frown as he liked : she had 
got the transfer and she had got Fiordelisa. 

She put her hands in her coat pockets and a cigar in her 
mouth, and drove over to Fiordelisa, with Mr. Silverly Bell 
and young Guido Serravalle and his lute by her side. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


423 


“ I have saved the place for loris,” she said to every one : 
it was a title the more to it. 

“ Did the Prince come here with anybody whilst I was 
away ?” she asked as she visited the pigs. 

They told her that he had come seldom, and had been 
always alone. 

“ Then of course there never was anything between him 
and Etoile,” she thought, with content. “ He would have 
brought her here of all places at once, if there had been.” 
For such follies as delicate instinct and lofty passions never oc- 
curred to her. She was clever, but she made a common error 
of some clever people : she judged others by herself This 
kind of error, however, conduces to content, and Lady Joan 
was content, and as she rambled about thought that next year 
she would really have that frost-bite of ruin and winter here. 

Imperator would never get an hour of liberty then, nor his 
master. 

“ To 'think I have saved the dear old place I It is so de- 
lightful !” she said again and again to her companions, and 
said it so often that she ended in believing it herself 

“ She has saved his estate for him 1” said her friends after 
her in chorus, with strophe and anti-strophe of praise, marvel, 
and applause. 

It was a fine day, though cold, this first day that she had 
visited Fiordelisa. The snow was on the mountains, and she 
wished that it might be thick enough to block up Mr. Chal- 
loner in Germany, but in the green plains the sea-wind was 
blowing not unkindly, and the yellow colchicum cups were 
glancing among the grasses. She spent a short day but a 
bright day, rejoicing to seize her sceptre and her scales, to set 
her foot down heavily on the innocent little freedoms that aged 
servants had taken in her absence, to see the household all 
Imrry and skulk like trembling school-boys, the dog cower, 
and the steward turn red over his books, to feel her power 
all over the old house and the old lands and the old people. 

She had a happy day though a brief one, and drove back 
to Rome as the sun set, feeling that truly for a wise woman 
all joys of this world are possible. 

“ Is that woman here ?” she said to her companion, as they 
drove across the burning amber glow that rested on the plain. 

What woman ?” 


424 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ Etoile.” ^ 

“ Oh, yes : she is in her solitude at Eocaldi.” 

“ Always at Rocaldi ?” 

“ Is she painting ?” 

“ They say not : she has finished nothing. Some say she is 
ill.” 

Lady Joan smiled. 

“ 111 !” she echoed, and she lighted a new cigar. 

“ She has never come to me ; never written me a word ; 1 
knew she never would when once I had seen ray father.” 

Mr. Silverly Bell sighed ; he was always compassionate. 

“ She is in love with lo, you know ; actually sent him letters 
to Paris !” she continued, after a pause. 

“Indeed?” said Mr. Silverly Bell, cautiously. “And 
he ?” 

“ Hates her 1” said the Lady Joan. “ lo knows nothing 
about love, you know ; he is like me : he only cares for 
friendship 1” 

Mr. Silverly Bell coughed, not knowing quite what to say. 

Fortunately there was a very fine sunset, and he made a 
remark on it. 

The Lady J oan drove onward with a smile on her face : it 
pleased her to think of Etoile ill with her pictures untouched. 

She set down her companions at their respective destina- 
tions, and then turned the heads of her steeds to the house of 
loris by the Piazza del Gesu. There was still a dull red glow 
from the west suffusing the city. 

He was absent, but she entered, as her habit was, and 
brushed past his servant up the staircase to his own little 
chamber. 

“ I want some papers for your master,” she said to him. 

The servant dared not oppose her entrance wheresoever she 
might choose to go. It was quite true that she wanted some 
papers, — papers concerning the new society that had sprung 
to life under her fostering care ; papers that she knew were on 
his table. The little room was dark, but she struck a match 
and lit a candle, and began unceremoniously her search amidst 
the letters, books, and documents of all sorts that were scat- 
tered over his bureau. She knew ail his ways and all the 
hiding-places of his desk, and rummaged in them without 


FRIENDSHIP. 425 

remorse, searching for what she wanted, the eyes of her own 
portrait looking down on her from the chamber wall. 

Suddenly amidst her search through the mass of business 
correspondence and letters on ceremonials of the court, she saw 
a handwriting which made all the blood leap to her face, and 
her hand seized the note that bore it as a cat seizes prey. 

It was a note of Etoile’s, written that day, and left by him 
there by an unwonted carelessness, instead of being consigned 
to that secret drawer of which his visitor did not possess the 
secret. He had put it back in its envelope, moved it hastily 
under a pile of letters, and gone out quickly to go to Rocaldi. 

Lady Joan read it. 

It was not of great length, but there were words in it that 
told her all the truth hidden from her so long. She read it 
thrice, all the blood fading out of her face, while her teeth 
clinched like the jaws of a steel-trap. 

She had been fooled, beguiled, betrayed. And at length 
she knew it. 


CHAPTER XLIII. 

Her first impulse was that of any wounded tigress, — to 
spring and rend and kill. 

A sort of madness seized her ; in her fury she would have 
slain him at a blow had he been there before her. A thousand 
fires flashed before her gleaming eyes ; a thousand hammers 
seemed beating on her brain ; the room reeled around her ; 
she could have screamed aloud, but her tongue clove to her 
mouth ; she stood and stared down on the letter in the dull 
light of the flickering taper, and knew herself fooled, beguiled, 
betrayed. 

Vengeance alone seemed to her worth living for, — to kill 
them both as tigers kill. 

There was fierceness enough in her blood, and strength 
enough in her nerve, to have driven the steel straight home 
through flesh and bone without ever wavering once. 

But it is women who love, even if they love guiltily, that 
kill : she loved herself. The little chamber was very still, the 
light of the taper very dim ; in the silence and the calmness and 
86 * 


426 


FRIENDSHIP. 


the solitude the paroxysm passed away : she remembered the 
world. 

The fierceness of her fury seethed and hissed itself into a 
sullen calm ; she was alone, and there was nothing for the 
tempest to destroy : it raged impotent and spent itself 

Prudence, which soon tempered her passions, to harden 
them the more, as the cold flood of water hardens the heated 
steel, returned to her. 

What use is it to kill any one ? 

They suffer for ten minutes ; you suffer for the rest of your 
life. 

There were other ways than that. 

Despite all her vanity, all her credulity, all her willingness 
to believe the thing she wished, at the back of her thoughts 
in the depth of her heart, unadmitted, detested, thrust away, 
there had always been the latent consciousness that the love 
of loris had passed from her and gone to this other woman 
whom she hated. A million little traits came back upon her 
now that might have told her all the truth so long before, had 
not her eyes been blinded by the cataract of an immense and 
undoubting vanity. Out from the limbo of forgotten triviali- 
ties there started to her memory now a million signs of glance, 
of word, of gesture, that should have told her, ere the Lenten 
lilies had been white, that these two had understood each other 
in tenderest sympathy and comprehension. All these memo- 
ries now seemed to dart from their hiding-places and shoot 
little tongues of flame at her like demons at their play. She 
had been fooled all the while 1 

To a vain woman what blow so deadly, what offence so 
beyond all pardon ? 

She stood like a stupefied creature, the letter in her hand ; 
and the recollection of her world — the world she lived for — 
came to her. 

Though her rage should choke her, and her hatred strangle 
her, she must have no scene the world would hear of, — no rash, 
wild vengeance that would level the Temple of all the Virtues 
with the dust. 

It was quite night. 

Time had fled without her taking any count of its swift 
passing. No one had dared disturb her. loris had not re- 
turned. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


427 


Prudence, and the chillier self-control begotten of a supreme 
self-love, ruled her once more. She put the letter back under- 
neath others as she had found it, and gathered up the papers 
she had come to seek, and blew the taper out, and groped her 
way to the door. 

On the staircase a lamp was burning : his servant hurried 
out, hearing her. 

“ I thought milady was gone long ago,*” he stammered, 
wondering. 

She controlled her voice to cheerfulness and calm command. 

No, Giannino, your master had left me so much to write. 
T wish he would do his own work,” she said, with her usual 
familiar laugh and frank, curt way. “ Call me some cab, will 
you ? I shall be late home for dinner. Do you know where 
the Prince is gone ?” 

Giannino knew very well, but he threw his hands to heaven 
and swore ignorance. 

She went out of the house, and home. 

At home she locked herself in her bedchamber and passed 
the most bitter hour of her life. But when the hour was 
passed, her resolve was taken. 

A true and tender woman would have broken her heart ; a 
true and impassioned woman would have ruined herself, taking 
some fleet, fierce revenge to be mourned for with a lifetime of 
remorse. 

She, who was always strong and never true, knew better 
ways than these. 

When she heard his laggard step on the stairs and his tired 
voice in the antechamber, she rose and withdrew the bolts and 
bade him come to her. When he came she threw her arm 
about his throat. 

“ I am feverish and cold, lo : feel my cheeks and my hands. 
I have been doing too much for you at Fiordelisa. Where 
have you been all day ?” 

And she kissed him. 

She felt him shudder. 

And again she kissed him ; having chosen her vengeance, — 
a vengeance that should not lose for her Fiordelisa. 

Her first impulse had been the impulse of every woman that 
finds herself forsaken for another. Her second instinct was 
the stronger one of self-interest. Keen, violent, tempestuous as 


428 


FRIENDSHIP. 


her passions were, one curb lay on them always, — the resolve 
never for them or their indulgence to lose a single advantage, 
a single practical gain. 

To dash his hands away, to strike the lips that had touched 
another’s, to drive him out of her presence under a storm of 
curses, ay, even to send a trusty blade straight through his 
breast-bone, these were all her first impulses, fierce, natural, 
maddened, unthinking. But before her, like a saving spirit 
to arrest her blows and teach her patience, rose the memory 
ot^ — Fiordelisa. 

To slay loris — even to quarrel with him — was to lose 
Fiordelisa. 

Fiordelisa was first, and he but second. 

But for Fiordelisa she would have scourged him from her 
sight, or have done worse to him ; but Fiordelisa was as a 
silver chain lying on her rage and keeping it dumb and still. 

The years were waning with her, and in a little while men 
would cease to find sorcery in her smile. If she exiled herself 
from Fiordelisa, never would she find such another kingdom, 
never again would wine-press and granary be piled full for her 
gain, and indolence and negligence drop a sceptre to her grasp ; 
never again. 

And she knew it. 

Though a woman who deluded herself on many things, she 
had no delusion here. 

“ You will never find such another fool,” had her husband 
said once to her in a moment of candor ; and she knew very 
well that she never would, — that, Cleopatra though she was, 
her days with Caesars were done. 

Bearer than all passion, sweeter than all vengeance to her, 
were her scales and her stock-books, her ledgers and her 
leathern purse, her sway on the breezy wild hills, her rule in 
the ancient gray halls. 

Lose Fiordelisa! 

Her heart turned sick, her blood ran cold, at the mere 
thought. 

Another woman reign there in her stead, — a woman who 
would hold the old oaks sacred, let the song-birds sing, kneel 
by the old altars, and bid roses bloom and children laugh and 
peasants be free and the lord of all be lord in truth ! 

Never, she swore in her soul, never, never, by all the 


FRIENDSHIP. 429 

gods of vengeance, would she be thus dethroned and thus 
displaced. 

Sooner would she hurl torches in the granaries and see the 
flames rage in a hurricane of fire north and south and east 
and west till Fiordelisa were a blackened waste. 

The terror of this peril calmed her. 

loris she might furiously have released, or as furiously 
have struck with her clinched hand ^nd cursed and banished. 
But Fiordelisa ! 

She sat there in the little darkling room with the taper like 
a tiny star beside her, and felt that she would sooner lose her 
life than Fiordelisa. 

Therefore, burn in anguish, chafe in humiliations as she 
would, she must needs choke herself into silence and give him 
no pretext of an angry glance, no opening of a furious word, 
no hint of her knowledge of his infidelity, no power to seize 
the liberty that lies in dissension and avowal. She must be 
silent, let silence cost her what it would, since speech would 
lose her Fiordelisa. 

If she had never known the truth, she would have been 
suspicious, importunate, watchful, jealous, angered, curious, 
always interrogating and always spying ; and loris would have 
grown impatient, and soon or late some bitter word would 
have unlocked the gates of his secret and the fetters of his 
bondage both at once. 

But forewarned is forearmed. 

Knowing the truth, and having resolved never to show she 
knew it, nothing could seem more trustful, no one more un- 
conscious of any rival near her, than was she ; she seemed 
completely credulous of all he said, and against her mingled 
ardor and good faith, devotion and his restless consciousness 
broke itself bitterly in vain, as waves break powerless on a 
bank of sand. If she had but broken out into rage once, all 
would have been said, and he forever free. 

But she kept her temper like a very Griselda. 

Since the first winter that she had wooed him, he had never 
known her so tender and so caressing ; the harshness of her 
natural tones was hushed and the vigilance of her endless 
espionage was abated. To a woman who suspects you it is 
easy to say, “ I am faithless to a woman who trusts you it 
is very hard to say it.* 


430 


FRIENDSHIP. 


She knew this so well. She took heed to let no shadow of 
a doubt ever seem to hover near her. With the snow white 
on the streets and plains, she spoke with a smile of their coming 
summer at Fiordelisa. 

Now and then, carelessly, as of a thing indifferent alike to 
both, she spoke of Etoile. 

“ I am glad she has the conscience not to come near me,” 
she said, one day. “ That shows she knows what my poor 
father said to me. Does she persecute you, lo, with any more 
letters ?” 

“ Did I ever say that I was persecuted ?” he muttered, as 
•he turned away impatient with himself. 

The Lady Joan laughed pleasantly. 

“ Oh, no ; I dare say you felt very complimented ; men 
always do on their bonnes fortunes : do they not, Marjory?” 

And the Echo was careful to reply. 

“ lo looks quite vain, I think. It is not everybody who 
fascinates a feminine Raffaelle who can give his features im- 
mortality upon canvas.” 

“ What folly !” said loris, with a dark flush on his cheek. 
Then Lady Joan and the Echo laughed again. 

But that was all. 

When he was absent, when he was inattentive, when he 
was intentionally negligent of her summons and ceased to 
accompany her to ball or opera or any public place, she was 
still a very Griselda in her patience. She even said to him, 
“ You are right, dear, perhaps, to be seen with me less : people 
will talk.” 

But all the while with all her patience she made him feel 
that she held him closely in a very labyrinth of his own weav- 
ing, and she never spoke of any coming day or year, or even 
distant hereafter, but what she spoke of it as something they 
were quite sure to share together. 

There was a sort of hateful anodyne in this security of claim 
that seemed to drug him and hold him motionless and para- 
lyzed, as the fell curare holds the victim that it drugs. 

Once she said to him, tenderly, — 

“ Caro mw^ I feel quite ashamed when I think that I made 
you that scene in Paris. With all your devotion to me, to 
insult you by any idea that you could be untrue to me for five 
minutes 1 I quite hate myself, lo ; I do, indeed 1” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


431 


She would say these things in the noise of a street, in the 
buzz of society, in the midst of the world, so that they gave 
him no chance of a reply that might have been the prelude to 
truth and freedom, but only filled him with a sickly sense of* 
all that she expected, all that she would exact, and that she 
took for granted that he was hers forever. 

All this cost her very dear : when hate and fury, dread and 
jealous fear, were seething together in her, and all her veins 
were on fire with outraged vanity and the consciousness of his 
broken faith, to have to keep her fury dumb, to rein in her 
violence, to caress and smile and be still, and seem to know 
nothing, and give no vent to any one of the bitter words that 
every moment sprang to her lips, — all this cost her very dear. 
But she had served a long apprenticeship in the world to the 
art of self-repression ; and hence she held steadily one great 
aim in view, and it gave her nerve and patience : — not to lose 
Fiordelisa ; never to lose Fiordelisa. 

This was her Alpha and her Omega. 

A feebler or a franker woman would have jeopardized all in 
one hour of reproach or of entreaty. But she knew better 
than to give him any such loophole for escape. A tempest 
clears the air : she filled her atmosphere with mist, in which, 
strive as he would for the light, he should lose his path and 
be forever lost. Long, long before hanging her cashmere up in 
the loggia of Fiordelisa on the first day of her entrance there, 
she had known that the wisdom for her in the future must be 
— immovability ; that she must never seem to know, to hear, 
to see, to feel, any sign that he might ever give that her reign 
should cease and her steps depart. 

To that wisdom she adhered now. 

It cost her many bitter hours to cling to it, but it was her 
sheet-anchor, and she never let it go. And in her way she was 
very wise. 

Mr. Challoner had returned for Christmas: he never by any 
chance neglected a domestic festival. The city was full, and 
teacups and triptychs were in requisition ; the mighty cousins 
were some of them arrived or arriving; the houses that had 
to be called at were many. Mrs. Grundy and Mrs. Candor 
were at the head of their serried battalions. The Lady Joan, 
as usual, was busy conciliating, propitiating, purchasing, sell- 
ing, entreating, investing, ingratiating. She looked ill, and 


432 


FRIENDSHIP. 


grew very thin, and had a feverish, harassed glance in her 
eyes. 

“ It is the great grief she has had,” said the Scrope-Stairs. 

^ “It is the superhuman energy she has shown,” said Mr. 
Silverly Bell ; and Society said after them, “ Great grief — 
great energy — most laudable — most admirable,” and went 
still oftener than ever to call on her. 

She was supposed to have had a great financial success. 
People are very fond of such success. 

Success like that of Etoile is not popular : it seems to be 
seated on some inaccessible pinnacle whence it seems to shower 
pity and scorn on mankind. But a success like the mended 
pot’s, monetary, commonplace, practical, comfortable, — that is 
another thing : everybody likes it, everybody trusts it. 

Everybody went to her accordingly, and she had many 
pleasant little occasions on which to drop a word in everybody’s 
ear. 

“ Etoile ? Oh, dear, no ! I never see her, never wish. She 
never comes near me since I saw my poor father. If I 
thought I should meet her anywhere, I should not go there. 
No. Well, perhaps not worse than other artists. I believe 
she lays nets for lo. He hates her, but he is very weak. 
Poor lo ! Fancy anybody making a hero of lo ! But, to be sure, 
perhaps I cannot judge myself; he has been like a brother to 
me so long : poor lo !” 

For she was of this complexion, that heaven might have 
been crashing, and the earth reeling to its doom, but she would 
have been ready to buy cheap a length of lace or make a 
desirable acquaintance. It is of this stout stuff that great 
characters are always made. 

She was really wretched ; she was really half mad with rage 
and pain and terror ; in sober truth, waking or sleeping, night 
or day, the thought of her rival was never absent from her. 
But all the same she neglected none of all the minutiae that 
Society exacts ; she ran up the stairs alike of her studios and 
her drawing-rooms; she went on her rounds of visits with her 
husband ; and she could still rouse herself and calm herself 
in a hurricane of hysterics if there came the slightest chance 
of selling a teacup at a profit. 

And when everybody was gone she would lie on her sofa 
and take some ether, and say to her maid, “ Send for the Prince 


FRIENDSHIP. 


433 


loris, will you, Mariannina ? Say I am very ill this evening.” 
When reluctant he obeyed the summons, she would note how 
cold his glance was, how unwilling his step, how indifferent 
his voice, and would choke the jealous rage in silence in her 
heart, and pass her hand over his brow and murmur to him, 
“ I am so ill to-night j I cannot let you go again. Amor mio^ 
give me those drops : I am faint.” 

He bent his knee beside her, sullen and yet contrite. She 
looked thin, she looked hectic, she looked worn : he could not 
doubt her love for him, she grew so gentle. 

“ Would to heaven she would hate me !” he thought, and 
hated himself. 

But she did not hate him. 

True, there were times when she could have snatched the 
silver dagger from her hair and plunged it in his breast, like 
any jealousy-maddened fisher-girl on the edge of the waves by 
Amalfi. True, there were hours when, knowing how he had 
fooled her, how he believed he fooled her still, how laggard was 
liis step, how languid his caress, how dark and averted his 
glance, she could have rent him limb from limb. True, there 
were moments when even yet the fierce, wild temper in her 
asserted itself, and she was ready to fling the truth in his face 
and curse him and let him go. 

But in her inmost soul she loved him, in her savage selfish 
way, more than she had ever done in her life ; in her heart she 
felt a sullen respect for him for having so well deceived her ; 
and the sense that his love was gone to another sharpened the 
passion in her to new keenness, gave it a new birth, a new 
lease of life, fresh vigor and fresh tenacity. She had grown 
careless of him, being so very sure he was her toy for life ; 
but now that she knew how slender was her hold, and how at 
every hour it might snap, she strained every nerve to hold him. 
Vengeance she would have; but it should be such vengeance 
as should fetter him forever and not cast him free. 

For in her way she was very wise. 

And she lay on her sofa, and took her ether and her mor- 
phia, and sent for him, and wound her fingers close about his 
wrist, and said, “ You must not leave me, dear ; yes, I feel 
faint and ill. I shall be strong again with the spring, — at our 
dear Fiordelisa.” 


T 


37 


434 


FRIENDSHIP. 


CHAPTER XLIV. 

“ One of the women that forgive,” he had said of Etoile. 

What woman is not of these, that loves truly? 

She forgave from the depths of her soul, though shuddering 
she turned from the memory of what it was that she forgave. 
She forgave, even as he had justly said she would have kissed 
his hand if it had stabbed her. But even as had she been 
stabbed by him the dulness of death would have come to her 
through him, so now a great dread and a great humiliation 
weighed on her and would not pass away. 

“ You have let her come back, not knowing the truth ?” 
she said to him ; and when he could but answer her “ Yes,” 
with averted eyes and a flush on his olive cheek, she felt a 
great sense of hopelessness fall upon her. 

She was not angered ; she did not upbraid him. These 
are the selfish ways of little and vain natures. She loved 
him so much that she shut her lips over all reproach or re- 
buke. But she began to comprehend that his will was much 
as are the reeds by the river, and his promise unstable as the 
winds that wander amidst the reeds ; and this was more terri- 
ble to her than any peril of circumstance could have been. 
Against circumstance the strong nature will rise dauntless and 
unwearied, however long or painful be the conflict, but against 
the woes that spring from character the bravest is powerless. 
No one can alter nature. 

Bully and slowly Etoile awoke to the consciousness that 
when she had thought she loosened the toils from about his 
feet, she had but wound them about herself as well. 

He soothed her with tender words. He reassured her with 
earnest promise. He begged of her only to have patience a 
little while longer, and said that all would be well. She lis- 
tened and obeyed, fearing to rouse the mysteries and dangers 
that seemed to lie about his path. She did not understand, 
therefore she was afraid to move. On one thing only was 
she resolute. 

“ If I see her ” she said with a shudder to him, “ if I 


FRIENDSHIP. 


435 


see her, — which I pray heaven to spare me, — I cannot speak 
to her or look at her; she must think of me what she will.” 

“ Surely : would I ask you to know her now ?” he answered ; 
and he did feel that not for an empire would he have the hands 
of these women meet ; and Etoile would not have been what 
he loved if she would have smiled upon her foe and his 
destroyer. 

Yet in his heart, though he hated himself for the transient 
emotion, he felt a momentary impatience, a momentary wish 
that she were of lighter temper, like others, and took things 
less deeply. He had been used to a world in which the wife 
smiled on her husband’s mistress, the husband on the man 
that dishonored him, the bitterest foes were the best friends in 
seeming, and the rivalry, the intrigue, the crime, the enmity 
of the hour, were all alike concealed beneath a surface of 
courtesy and cordiality, and the friendship of society was but 
a mask for lusts, for treachery, for hatreds. He loved her 
because she was not like this world ; yet habit and usage made 
him for an instant wish that she would stoop to its convenient 
hypocrisies, its bland untruths. 

“ What would it cost her to be ostensibly friends with her 
rival for a few brief weeks till I am free?” he thought; and 
then he repented of the thought, and felt that it was unworthy 
both of himself and her. And how did he mean to take his 
freedom ? He did not know. He drifted trusting to chance. 
He had lost his opportunity. Opportunity is our good angel, 
but if when it knocks we do not open quickly, it goes away 
from us rarely to return. He was in the mist and twilight of 
a great dilemma, and as one little cloud spreads all over the 
heavens till the earth is dark with storm, so one hesitating and 
timid untruth spread into a night of falsehood, a shipwreck 
of life and love. 

Etoile, who all her life had been strong because she had 
been aloof from mankind and indifferent to human pains and 
joys and wrapped in the lofty egotisms of the arts, Etoile 
was now weak as the weakest ; every woman is so that loves 
greatly. In a great love the eyes are blinded, the lips are 
closed, the ears are deaf, the will is paralyzed, — only beholding, 
only breathing for, only hearing, only obeying, one other life 
out of all the millions upon earth ; and nothing short of this 
is love. 


436 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Sho was weak, and weakness is ever unwise. She shrank 
from any chance of meeting the woman whom it made her 
burn with shame to think was still her rival. She shrank 
from any obligation of going into the routine of society and 
greeting or passing by as some mere acquaintance the lover 
who was all the world to her. All the trivial untruths, the 
conventional masquerades that society regards as venial, indeed 
as right and wise, were to her cowardly and guilty evasions ; 
she could not stoop to them. She could keep silence since he 
wished it ; she would bear pain if it pleased him to lay it on 
her; she would even submit to injurious construction and 
slanderous comment if it came to her through obedience to 
his will. But she would not act a social lie ; therefore she 
shut her doors on the world and would not go out to it, and 
let it babble what it might of her. 

She was very happy still, very often ; she believed that he 
scarcely saw her rival ; she was full of faith in his words and 
in her future. She withdrew into solitude, because solitude 
was sweeter to her than any companionship when he was 
absent. She prayed for him, she smiled on him often when 
she could have wept ; in his absence she gave herself to art 
for his sake, that he might still be proud of her. 

Alas ! prayer was of no avail ; nor tenderness, nor love, 
nor any delicacy or constancy of faith. To save him she 
needed to have been of coarser fibre, of colder heart, of 
tougher mould ; she needed to have been blunt and fierce and 
subtle and resolute like her foe. 

Ariel could not combat a leopardess ; Ithuriefs spear glances 
pointless from a rhinoceros’ hide. To match what is low and 
beat it, you must stoop and soil your hands to cut a cudgel 
rough and ready. She did not see this, and, seeing it, would 
not have lowered herself to do it. 

She withdrew herself into solitude, and loved him as one 
woman perhaps loves once in a century. It seemed to her 
that it was all that she could do ; that it must be enough, 
since he loved her. 

But it was not enough ; because he was not alone. Bestless, 
ruthless, ever-present, avaricious of every moment, unscrupu- 
lous in every guile, fierce as a driving sirocco, and penetrating 
everywhere like the sirocco’s sand, her rival was forever beside 
him. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


437 


If she had gone down into the mud of the arena and fought 
with the same weapon as her foe, she would have vanquished ; 
but pride held her back, and love and faith, which would not 
insult him. 

She stayed aloof, and could not struggle with what was base 
basely. 

So the day of battle waned and went against her. 

The same crowd on the Pincio spoke of her that had spoken 
the year before, only with interest less lively because she was 
no more a novelty. 

“ She is always in Rome ?” 

“ Yes, at Rocaldi.” 

“ What does she do at Rocaldi ?” 

“ Humph — well — ah ! . . . ” 

Then people laughed, no one knew very well why. 

“ Does she send to the Salon this year ?” 

“ Nothing.” 

“ Is she ill ?” 

“ Nobody knows.” 

“ One sees her driving?” 

“ Oh, yes, you may see her driving.” 

“ Not in society ?” 

“Not in society this year.” 

“ Very odd.” 

“ Such women are always odd.” 

“ She seems to shut herself up like a nun ; perhaps the big 
dog is a man in disguise.” 

Then everybody laughed again, and thought they were 
witty. 

On such a congenial temper of Society, and into minds 
so well prepared, the voice of her foe and its echoes easily 
dropped well-chosen words. 

Lady Joan was in mourning and could not go out in the 
evening, but she called upon people assiduously and received 
them at home on her Wednesdays, there being nothing in tea 
and talk against woe. 

“ So sorry you should ever have been exposed to meeting 
her here,” she said, with cordial apology and a sad tone in her 
voice ; “ so very, very sorry. But my poor dear father’s name 
was used without his knowledge ; his very last words to me 
almost were in anger about her ; oh, for myself I do not mind ; 

37 * 


438 


FRIENDSHIP. 


I am not prudish ; but for all my dear friends who met her 
here I feel I cannot make atonement enough.” 

Then she would smile a little and add, “ It is so tiresome 
for poor lo ; she has taken such a fancy for him, and now 
that she does not come here she never sees him of course, and 
she is always teasing him, — sending after him. He never 
goes indeed, but still to a man of delicate mind like lo it 
is painful ; yes, artists are always very strange ; it is a great 
pity.” 

And she would look very frank and very sorrowful, and her 
echoes would say the same thing a little more faintly, but very 
faithfully, till Society was all one big echo, singing the same 
song, like the rocks round a lake. 

Mr. Silverly Bell, like the famous Hibernian echo which 
embroiders variations, would add, “ The generous hospitality 
of Lady Joan so abused ! Her noble friendship so slandered ! 
So sad, so shocking, so shameful I No, I have no idea who 
pays for Rocaldi. Not its tenant, — certainly not its tenant. 
She sends nothing to the Salon this year. Poor loris ! It all 
annoys him unspeakably. He never saw her save in the Casa 
Challoner, — never !” 

This was what Etoile had done by leaving the field to her 
foes, whilst scornful of the tongues of the world, and always 
indifferent to their blame as to their praise, she lived on in her 
solitude, counting the hours till they brought her loris. He 
told her that he scarcely saw her rival, never save when the 
complications of their entangled affairs made it unavoidable. 
To doubt him was very difiicult to her. To watch him was 
impossible. ^ 

Out of an exaggerated sense of the honor due to him, she 
would never utter his name to others ; never pass down a 
street where it could seem as if she watched him ; never take 
any means, not the most innocent, to ascertain whether what 
he said were true or false. He loved her, and that was enough. 
He was master of both their fates. 

“ So you have withdrawn yourself to your rock in the 
middle of the sea, or rather in the middle of your vineyards,” 
said Lady Cardiff to her one day, with approval in her phrases, 
but vexation in her soul. “ Well, no doubt you are very wise, 
my dear. Every one to his taste. Perhaps it is better to drop 
Society altogether unless you conform to it altogether and make 


FRIENDSHIP. 


439 


it pleasant to you by being pleasant to itself, painting your 
eyebrows, tittle-tattling, wearing your gowns half-way down 
your spine, finding an H.R.H.’s impudence honor, kissing your 
worst enemy, being prettily fickle and smilingly false, and 
making yourself generally placable and affable. As you will 
not do that, perhaps the rock in the middle of the sea — or the 
vines — is best for you, as his skylight was for Victor Hugo. 
I am sure I dare not say it isn’t. Only it does seem a pity, 
at your age, with your talents, to shut yourself up in a sort of 
Paraclete with a lot of palm-trees. It does seem a pity. To 
be sure, there is Tsar.” 

“ There is always Tsar,” said Etoile, with a smile. 

“ And loris,” thought Lady Cardiff, with impatience and 
discontent. 

“ loris embellishes a Paraclete, no doubt,” she mused to 
herself. “ But she is making a terrible error. She loves with 
the immortal love of the poets, and he with the trivial passion 
of the world. I am sure of it, as sure as if they were both 
before me. And what is the use of secluding herself under 
her palm-trees? Seclusion will not beat that bully who owns 
him. On the contrary, she should be always in the world, 
always taking away her foe’s friends, countermining her foe’s 
mines, shining, succeeding, giving her lover hosts of rivals to 
fear, showing him always her own power, her own triumph, 
her own caprices. That is the way that rivals are beaten and 
men are retained. But she does not see it. If she did see it 
she would not do it. She will wait under her palms for him 
to come to her. Whenever he ceases to come, then she will 
break her heart and live alone till she dies. I always used to 
wonder how Heloise, with all her sense and knowledge and 
genius and Greek and Latin, ever could let Abelard beat her. 
I don’t wonder since I have known Etoile. I am quite sure 
loris beats her — metaphorically speaking — just because he has 
been so tired of being beaten himself Ah, dear me ! why 
couldn’t the fates have been kinder and have left that other 
woman on her house-top in Damascus !” 

But Lady Cardiff was a grande c?ameand a wise person, too 
high-bred to speak of what did not concern her : so she 
thought all this only in vexed silence, and merely said, with a 
plea.sant smile, — 

“ To be sure, there is always Tsar.” Tsar, who at that 


440 


FRIENDSHIP. 


moment was tossing in play, in the air over his head, a man’s 
glove, — a glove that belonged to the slender, soft, dark hand 
of loris. 

Lady Cardiff saw that it was a man’s glove, but she said 
nothing. 

“You have heard of my poor friend? of Dorotea?” said 
Etoile, hurriedly, to alter the subject. 

“ Yes ; I have heard.” 

“ Is not the world bitterly cruel ? Can there be a viler sen- 
tence, a more hideous injustice ?” 

“ Perhaps the one the world will pass on you will be as 
much so,” thought Lady Cardiff, as she answered aloud, “ You 
hear nothing from herself?” 

“ Nothing — now — for many months.” 

“ But you believe in her innocence ?” 

“ As I believe that the sun shines in the heavens.” 

“ Dear me ! And she is worse than dead ?” 

“ Worse than dead I” 

The tears rolled down the cheeks of Etoile as she spoke, 
and she turned away. Life from one lovely, classic, cold 
vision of all the arts had changed and become to her a thing 
so exquisitely beautiful, so fearfully terrible, that she grew 
dizzy in its midst. 

Lady Cardiff glanced at her, and said aloud, pleasantly, — 

“ My dear. Tsar will tear that glove. Is it yours ?” 

“ It is Ireneo’s. He spoils Tsar very much,” said Etoile, 
unthinkingly, and then she grew a little pale, being afraid 
that she had betrayed the secret of her lover. 

“ loris ? Ah ! he is very fond of dogs. Lady Joan beats 
them,” said Lady Cardiff, tranquilly. 

The color burned in the face of Etoile. She was silent. 

“ After all. Paraclete is more like common humanity than 
one thought,” mused Lady Cardiff. “ That is a comfort.” 

But a vague apprehension was upon her, and she went 
away once more too engrossed and too pained to care to read 
her “ Figaro,” which was the effect that her visits to what she 
called Paraclete always produced on her. 

The “ Figaro” was equally interesting and veracious that 
day. It contained, like many other journals of Europe at 
that epoch, the full account of the suit of the Due de San- 
torin against his wife, known to the world as Dorotea Coronis, 


FRIENDSHIP. 


441 


— a suit in which the husband was completely triumphant, 
with a triumph chiefly due to the letters of a dead lover that 
he placed before the court. 

“ Why toill people write letters ?” said Lady CardiiF to her- 
self, with a tender pity for human nature. “ Were there any 
entanglements before people took to letter-writing ? I don’t 
think there can have been. Every bother and show-up comes 
out of letters nowadays. How nice and safe it would have 
been with only flowers for correspondence, as they had in the 
East before we civilized it ! If a marigold or a clove-pink 
were found and meant anything dreadful, you could always 
have said it was a mistake of the gardener’s. Santorin him- 
self couldn’t have taken a marigold or a clove-pink into court.” 

She drove on to the Pincio and got out and walked, and 
found every one talking of the Santorin suit, and full of sym- 
pathy for the husband. 

“ She would never sing a note after the Kussian died. That 
was proof of guilt enough 1” said lovely Mrs. Desart. 

“And she is gone into a convent in Spain,” added Lady 
Eyebright. » 

“ She should have gone there before,” said Mrs. Desart. 

“ Why do convents open their doors to such women ?” said 
Lady Joan Challoner, severely. 

“ But the letters were no proof of her infidelity,” said a 
man, who thought with a pang of that fairest face and that 
loveliest voice dumb and veiled in a living grave. “ The 
letters clearly reproached her with cruelty, with coldness. I 
cannot see myself ” 

“ There were the plainest possible proofs of criminal inter- 
course,” said Lady Joan and Mrs. Desart and Lady Eyebright 
together. “ The letters proved it ; and, if they did not, the 
servants’ testimony did ” 

“A maid she had discharged, and a valet of Santorin’s 1 
The old Spanish woman swore to her utter innocence ” 

“ The old Spaniard was in her dotage : the judge said so. 
Besides, the Russian was not the first ” 

“ Oh, mesdames ! ” 

“ She was a most profligate creature. To think she should 
have so often sung to our Queen 1” 

Lady Cardiff put her glass in her eye : 

“ She wasn’t divorced then, my dear Lady Joan. Anybody 


442 


FRIENDSHIP. 


adorned with the Scarlet Letter that is not a divorcee may 
come to Court : so I suppose they may sing at it. It is the 
Victorian rule. It has many conveniences ” 

Lady Joan winced, but was stern in her justice. 

“ It serves Santorin right for marrying a person out of the 
mud like that,” she said, still severely. “ What could he ex- 
pect ? Artists are always the same. And it will be so hard 
upon him now. He won’t be able to marry unless she dies.” 

“ You think it hard on men not to be able to marry ? How 
nice of you ! But then all marriages are not as happy as 
yours, dear Lady Joan,” said Lady Cardilf, and she turned to 
Mrs. Challoner. 

“ Santorin takes two millions from her under his marriage 
contract. Rather bathos, that, don’t you think ? If Menelaus 
had taken two millions from Helen would Greece have sym- 
pathized ? One doesn’t know. Morals alter so, and manners. 
Ours seems a lucrative age for husbands, doesn’t it ? If she 
could have gone on singing and paying his debts I am sure he 
would never have brought his suit. No?” 

Mrs. Challoner reddened, and said something vague about 
no payment of debts compensating any gentleman for dishonor. 

Lady Cardiff went onward meditatively. 

“ Dear, dear,” she thought to herself, “ that singing woman 
is dying in a convent, and our feminine Raffaelle leaning on a 
reed that will pierce her heart like a spear some day ! Dear, 
dear, what is the use of being born with the Muse in you if 
you cannot take better care of yourself than that? The 
woman was innocent, — yes, certainly innocent ; the letters 
prove, if they prove anything, how she strove against her love 
for her lover’s sake ; and yet, if she were singing anywhere, 
virtuous women like Lady Joan and the Desart could not hear 
her, and the very theatres would be scandalized, and very 
likely hiss ! What an admirable century ! Royal Courts are 
severe as Rhadamanthus on the morals of the few that sing at 
a state concert ; the twelve hundred that come to listen may 
have sinned as they liked ; that don’t hurt a Court at all !” 

Left alone, Etoile paced restlessly to and fro the long terrace 
on which the dog had been at play with the glove. 

The fate of her friend Dorotea had filled her with pain and 
indignation, though she had heard nothing more than what 
the world knew, for since the moment that she had been told 


FRIENDSHIP. 


443 


of F6dor SouroflF’s death, Dorotea Coronis had died herself to 
the world ; all ties and memories of living things or living 
friends had perished from her. But to Etoile also had come 
that supreme absorption of love in which other affections 
perish, and nothing in the wide world seems to matter so that 
one life lives and is near. The world often rails at this isola- 
tion and absorption of passion as an egotism, but it is in truth 
its highest sublimity. 

Love that remembers aught save the one beloved, muy be 
affection, but it is not love. She understood now Dorotea 
Coronis as she had not understood her on her first night in 
liome : that was all. 

The name uttered before her in union with her lover’s had 
cut to her very soul. 

It was to avoid this pain, this humiliation, this bitterness 
which she could not resent, that she had shut herself in loneli- 
ness Tiere, letting the world that loved to chatter of her give 
what motive it would to her solitude. 

Was it possible that in that world they still deemed him 
her rival’s ? 

Her cheeks burned, her pulse throbbed high as she paced 
to and fro in the late chilly day. How long was it to last, 
this secrecy, this silence, this mystery ? She was everything 
to him, and she seemed to be nothing. 

She had accepted this position because it was of his doing 
and his choice, but she had been always impatient of them. 
To the woman whose courage had been contemptuous and 
daring to a fault, no sacrifice could have been so hard as this 
demand to bear with cowardice and mask a truth. 

She had been shut in her solitude till she had forgotten 
how the world went on ; she remembered it with a shudder 
now. 

Was it possible that in the world he still passed as the lover 
of another? 

No : he was hers. That was enough. 

She would not wrong him with a doubt. He had told her 
such doubt was insult. 

So she paced her lonely terrace in the red wintry afternoons, 
and trusted him, and when his step was heard and his hand 
touched hers, asked nothing more of him or heaven. 

“ When I am not there she is alone and dreams of me,” 


444 


FRIENDSHIP. 


loris said to himself, and that knowledge made him careless. 

If her nature would have let her do so, it would have been \ 
wiser to have had her painting-room full of worshippers and 
her hours full of pleasures and ambitions ; he would have 
been insecure and anxious to keep his power, and would have 
hastened to cry to all others, “ Stand off 1 she is mine !” 

For men are made so. 

In all the feverish pangs of love there is none sharper than 
that with which the woman, who is loved in secret, sees the 
life that is her own passing in the crowd of the world, amidst 
other women, aloof from her, as a friend, as a stranger, whilst 
she must hold her silence, and give and take from him the 
empty phrases of ceremonial and custom ; for a little while it 
is sweet, that contrast between solitude and society, that soft, 
secret tie, that tender complicity undreamed of by others ; for 
a while it is very sweet, but afterwards it grows into a fretting 
pain, and brings a sense of galling bitterness. 

To Etoile the pain of it was doubly galling, because in all 
her life she had never stooped to seem the thing she was not. 

“ Love loses its loveliness made public ; it is like the grapes ; 
once handled, the bloom is gone,” he said to her, seeking to 
reconcile her ; and it was a truth, but only a truth true of love 
that does not speak at all ; not true of love that masks itself 
and lies. 

At other times he said to her, “ Wait, dear, wait but a very 
little more ; then all the world shall know that I — such as I 
am, and most unworthy — am all yours.” 

And she loved him so well that the mere sound of his voice 
— say what sophistry it would — was her paradise. 

“ She is nothing to you ?” she murmured to him that day, 
and hid her face on his breast as she asked it, because the ques- 
tion hurt her and seemed to her shameful. 

“ Do you dishonor me with the doubt?” he said, petulantly 
and with anger ; and she asked his forgiveness. She was not 
wise now, nor strong : she only loved him very greatly. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


445 


CHAPTER XLV. 

“Have I chosen the right way?” the Lady Joan asked 
herself again and again, with rage and fear at her heart. She 
knew all that he did with his time now, being once on the trace 
of his trespass ; she knew the hours that he passed with her 
rival ; she knew the way in which he spent time for which he 
accounted to herself with a thousand specious excuses. When 
these excuses were palmed off on her, she, knowing the truth, 
felt at times as if she must strike him dead ; but she held her 
peace stanchly, and smiled, and accepted what he said. Was 
it the right way ? Sometimes she doubted, sometimes a spasm 
of dread seized her ; but she knew men and their weaknesses 
and their impulses ; her experience told her that there was no 
other way half so sure. So she wore her mask. 

It was an iron mask, and hurt her ; but she wore it stanchly, 
never loosening it, however great the strain. She never let it 
drop before any living creature, not even before plump Mimo, 
from whom she had no secrets, — not even before her watchdog 
who had put her on the trail. 

“ I cannot forgive myself for ever introducing poor lo to 
Etoile ; she will end in entangling him. She is clever and he 
is so weak,” she would say to the former ; and to the latter add, 
with a smile, “ lo comes to me every day to complain of that 
woman and her passion for him. I laugh at him for being so 
fatally attractive. It does seem so absurd to us, dear, — doesn’t 
it ? — that anybody can see a hero in lo ! Of course we are all 
of us fond of him ; but lo will never set the Thames or the 
Tiber on fire.” 

Marjory Scrope could only listen, and feel a thrill of envious 
wonder at her friend’s coolness and skill. She herself could 
not wear a mask like that ; she could only feebly imitate her 
greater leader, and murmur in turn to Society, “ Oh, no, we 
never see her now ; we do not feel we could ; we have heard 
80 very much. They say, too, she pretends there is something 
wrong between our dear, dear friend and loris. As if we did 
not know ! as if anybody could know as we do ! So absurd, 

38 


446 


FRIENDSHIP. 


you know ; so cruel ; so like a woman who errs herself and 
judges every one by her own errors. Oh, no, indeed, you need 
never fear meeting her at our house ; we never see her now ; 
we should not receive her.” 

Meanwhile the three sisters brewed the sulphur fumes in 
their caldron, and in the Temple of all the Virtues the name 
of Etoile was daily sacrificed as a votive offering to the kind 
gods of Calumny, — those gracious and just gods who never 
frown when their priests are pleased or when the baked meats 
are plenteous. 

And Silverly Bell would shake his head, which he always 
found more effective than words, — shake his head, and sigh 
profoundly. 

Society understood that the sigh meant all kinds of unmen- 
tionable sin. 

Of a woman who had ceased to receive, as Etoile had done, 
who dwelt aloof from the world, and made it feel that it was 
less to her than the grasses under her feet in the fields. Society 
was always ready to believe anything. 

“ Oh, you noble imbecile ! Oh, you noble but most absolute 
imbecile !” thought Lady Cardiff, in a futile frenzy of irritation. 
“ Why don’t you understand ? why won’t you understand ? 
Have twenty lovers, and nobody’ll say anything ; but to have 
one It is a standing insolence to all the rest of our 

sex. If you must have only one, and if that one must be 
some one else’s perjured Launcelot, there is only one way for 
you to get yourself and Launcelot pardoned and to beat black- 
browed Guinevere out of the field and be victorious, — only one 
way : throw open your house, give dinners, go out everywhere, 
smile on everybody, be en Evidence every day ; make Guinevere 
look disagreeable, stingy, and shabby nobody beside you ; 
then the world will go with you, most likely, and never ask 
if you have only one or have twenty. But to shut yourself 
up and merely live for perjured Launcelot, and when he is 
absent model clay and paint on panels, what can the world of 
women make of you ? You are lusus naturse, ferse naturase , — 
unlike everything and everybody. Of course they will stone 
you, as village bumpkins run out and stone an odd stray bird 
that they have never seen before ; and the more beautiful the 
plumage looks, the harder rain the stones. If the bird were 
a sparrow the bumpkins would let it be.” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


447 


But Lady Cardiff could only think her thoughts, not utter 
them, being too high-bred to interfere in any one’s destiny 
unasked, and could only say, when she heard the stones pelt- 
ing in Society, — 

“ Etoile ? Oh, dear, yes ; of course I know her ; of course 
I go to her. Why not? Everybody did go last year; I 
should go if nobody did. It is very uncommon, you know, to 
see a woman who paints everything except her face, and who 
thinks Milton and Sophocles better company than ourselves. 
Odd? Yes, very odd ; that I grant, but interesting. An ad- 
venturess, is she ? Ah, I didn’t know it. Does it matter ? 
I thought she was a great artist. I may be mistaken. I am 
not mistaken ? Then why an adventuress ? I do not quite 
understand. Same thing, is it?” 

And then Society winced under Lady Cardiff’s eyeglass and 
her courtly smile ; and, feeling that it looked foolish to her, 
felt so. 

But one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one 
friend or fifty sufl&ce to stem the tide of enmity that is popu- 
lar. The world, as a rule, was always angered with a woman 
whom it had crowned, and who did not care for it; who valued 
a dead poet or a living daffodil more highly than itself; and 
who shut herself in a solitude that looked more scornful with 
her marbles and her canvas. When it found a weakness in 
her it shouted with joy and rained its stones. It was sweet 
as the rotten apples in Schiller’s desk to the vulgar. 

Her foe knew how to hold up rotten apples in the light and 
vow she found them on her. The world believed. The world, 
being made up of human beings, is very human ; it believes 
what it likes to believe. 

loris knew it; it angered him, but he let the fumes rise and 
the echoes beat. 

“ It is always so with what they envy,” he said to himself, 
and it seemed to him that she was more his own, thus isolated. 

What were such calumnies ? A rain of arrows would be 
borne for his sake, as Sebastian bore them for the sake of 
heaven. 

“ I am enough for her,” he said, and, when his conscience 
smote him, thought, “ It will be all clear some day when they 
know all ; she does not heed it ; she is not like other women ; 
the world is nothing to her. I am all.” 


448 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Besides, the worst he did not know ; for the voice that raised 
the echoes from the rocks was careful to call its worst in a lan- 
guage that was unfamiliar to him. Past his ear when it was 
strained to listen, the voice of the Lady Joan went down the 
wind calling aloud on Calumny, but always calling in English ; 
and Calumny, that looked the other way when she herself was 
sinning, and went by like a meek dog, mute, leaped up like a 
mastiff, and came foaming at the mouth. 

For she was a great administrator, and could manage even 
Calumny : it never bit her, and when she wished it flew on 
any foe she had. 

The close of Carnival came, and the revels of the Veglione 
with it, — -'the Veglione for so many years so dear to the soul 
of the Lady Joan, with its noise and glare, its malice and 
mischief, its shrieks and suppers, its travesty of mirth, its 
blasphemies of love. 

It was a bitterly cold night, and loris shivered as he left 
Etoile when the twelfth hour struck and went out into the 
frosty air. 

“ I have masses of correspondence to look into and answer 
by dawn,” he murmured as he kissed her and left her there 
amidst her palms and ferns, her bronzes and casts, her un- 
finished work in clay and on canvas. 

Then, with reluctant step and sinking heart, he went down 
into the heart of the city, to the gaslit and crowded vestibule 
of the Apollo, thronging with black dominoes and many- 
colored masquers ; and up the stairs of the theatre to the ball 
that he had gone to, year after year, on such nights as these, 
and opening the door of it, saw shining eyes through a vizard 
of satin, and heard a voice shout, with malicious glee, — 

“ Take me down-stairs, lo, quickly ! I have changed my 
rosette ; not a soul will know me.” 

He gave her his arm sullenly and silently. His thoughts 
were back in the silent shadowy chambers where another 
woman, in the pale light of her oil lamps, was putting the last 
touch to his own bust in marble. 

“ Thus, you seem always with me,” had said Etoile as they 
had parted ; and he had left her and had come to the opera ball. 

He descended to the tumult and turmoil, to the fumes of 
the wine and the smoke, to the screeching and whooping of 
masks, to the old, worn-out, stale, stupid roystering. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


449 


His companion’s hand clutched his arm tightly ; her voice 
pierced his ear as she hissed her innuendoes to others, or 
screamed the shrill whoop of the place. Year after year they 
had passed through the same throngs. He was sick of it, he 
loathed it, and loathed himself for coming to it ; hut Lady 
Joan was triumphant. 

She knew whence he had come, and she said once to him, 
“ Poor dear lo ! your head aches ? That comes of sitting all 
alone all your evening over those tiresome papers.” And 
he muttered a vague assent, and did not notice the glance like 
the flash of sharp steel that darted at him from the eye-holes 
of her mask. 

As he walked, deafened and weary and answering mechan- 
ically all those who challenged or laughed, he was wondering 
to himself why he had not had the courage to tell her that 
night in the old garden-paths of Fiordelisa, — wondering why 
he had not the courage now. 

' No one knew that she was here save her tried friends Mimo 
and Guido, who were very sure to keep her secret. The world 
supposed her still deep in crape and sorrow, safe in seclusion ; 
and Mr. Challoner, who for once might not have condoned so 
great an offence to Society, was for the moment in Venice on 
affairs connected with his shepherd’s crook and flock. This 
was the sort of merry scapata in which her most happy tem- 
perament rejoiced and gambolled as gambols a young goat. 

When she was tired of the boards below and of the yelling 
throng and went up-stairs to her niche in the third circle, she 
was in the highest spirits, or at least appeared so. There 
were none who knew her but her old friends. She ate her 
caviare with a relish, and cried aloud, — 

“ Didn’t you know that black domino that leaned against 
this door, lo? Oh, for shame I I did. It was your Corinna, 
— Etoile!” 

loris grew very pale: he knew it was a lie, but the lie 
infuriated him. 

“/SAe here !” he said, bitterly. “ What are you dreaming 
of? That she is like yourself?” 

She controlled her rage with the wonderful strength that 
self-interest and self-mastery had given her even in her wildest 
fury. She laughed aloud. 

“ My dear lo, take care what you say ; she may poniard us 
38 * 


450 


FRIENDSHIP. 


going out. Give me a sandwich. Etoile most certainly : why 
not? Come to watch you. You cannot be adored by a Co- 
rinna without being bored by it. Isn’t she a Corinna? 
Wasn’t Corinna a Muse no better than she should be? Guido, 
let us drink to the Tenth Muse, who is not like me, — the 
Tenth Muse that adores lo, and that is watching at the door 
with a dagger, I dare say !” 

And she laughed and emptied her glass. loris sat silent, 
his arms folded, his head bent. 

There were the actor-men present ; he could not speak ; it 
seemed to him like profanation to even defend the woman who 
was absent, in such a place as this. 

He saw nothing of the scene before him, — of the black 
mask, the glittering eyes, the glare of gas ; he saw Etoile in 
the white serge of her working-dress, with the drooping fronds 
of the ferns behind her, and her hand on the marble moulded 
in his likeness. 

On the morrow Lady Joan said to her friend, with a frank 
regret in her voice, — 

“ Those men that went to the Veglione last night tell me 
that Etoile was there, actually there, and following loris every- 
where. Poor lo ! who only went because as one of the club 
he was obliged to entertain. I feel such pain, I really do, 
that an accidental rencontre with her in our house should have 
brought about such a nuisance and scandal. And lo is such 
a gentleman, you know, — all the old chivalrous ideas of honor ; 
he will not even allow that she is to blame, though it is quite 
too annoying for him. What a horrid noise, by the way, all 
those masquers made going home ! I could not sleep the 
least all night for them : could you?” 

On the morrow loris, with his eyes heavy and his head hot 
from the stupid, noisy tumult of the night, went and found 
Etoile as he most cared to think of her, in her white serge 
working-dress, in her studio, amidst the marbles and the 
panels. 

She looked to him, as compared with that other, like one of 
her own cool, pale roses, beside a tumbled gas-lit red camellia. 

He sighed as he looked. 

She put her arms about his throat. 

“ What is there to make you sigh ? Tell me. If you would 
only trust me, — quite 1” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


451 


“ I do trust you, — entirely. I was only thinking what 
gross, foolish beasts are men, and that to be loved by you one 
ought to be (as a friend of yours once said) Petrarca at the 
least.” 

“ I do not want Petrarca : I want only you.” 

“ You have me, my angel, — such as I am.” 

She looked in his eyes with a hesitating fear. 

“ Wholly ? — always ? Are you sure ?” 

“ Wholly and always.” 

And he kissed her. 

“ That other is my weariness, my bane, my care,” he 
thought. “ No more. That is truth before heaven. No 
more.” 

No more ! But to be that is so much. 

It is to be as the lichen on the tree, as the rust on the steel, 
as the canker in the plant, as the mildew in the air. It is 
to penetrate, to weaken, to obscure, to entangle, to destroy, 
invisibly, imperceptibly, but certainly, with the certainty of 
death. 

Travellers in Western forests of virgin lands tell how strange 
and sad a sight it is to see a tall and stately tree in all its pride 
of leaf and crown of blossoms striving in vain to stretch up- 
ward to air and light under the clasping, strangling masses 
of its parasite creepers, that climb aloft on it and stifle it till 
it becomes no more than a mere leafless shaft, borne down by 
what caresses it. 

Who looks on a man’s life strangled under the parasite of 
a worn-out yet peraistent passion sees the same sorrowful sight 
as the wanderer in the Western wilds. The death of the tree 
in the forest is like the moral death of the man who is held by 
Avhat he knows to be base. The tree strains upward, pines for 
fresh air, and struggles beneath the enervating and paralyzing 
thing it nourishes, but all in vain. The poisonous parasite is 
the stronger. 

The days and the weeks went on, now, and he was not 
free, though the woman he loved and deceived believed him to 
be so. 

He thought that he did not deceive her, because that other 
was to him, as he said, only his weariness, his bane, his ruin ; be- 
cause each touch of her rough hand had grown hurtful to him ; 
because each glitter of her watchful eyes made him nervous 


452 


FRIENDSHIP. 


and restless ; because he only bore with her as a man may bear 
with an adder about his wrist, because he fears its mortal bite 
if Jie stir it. 

“I am yours only,” he said to Etoile, and deemed it no 
falsehood, because all that there was in him of heart, and 
mind, and soul, and tenderness, and passion, — all was hers; 
and to that other he rendered only such sullen counterfeit of 
unwilling and unreal emotions as were wrung from him by her 
insistence and his hesitation. A passive obedience counts not 
as loyal service. A forced assent means nothing. 

So he told himself, and bade his conscience be still, when, 
with a heavy fancied sense of guilt, he sat beside his tyrant and 
heard her speak of future summers in his old home together, 
and bent his reluctant head to the ardors of her greeting or 
her lingering good-night. 

Looking back over the waste of years since she crossed his 
path, he saw them strewn with lost time, lost talents, lost 
hopes, lost honor, lost fortune, — all lost by her or through her, 
and gone for evermore. Yet she was like the adder on the 
wrist, the parasite on the palm: he dared not stir, he could 
not reach the light of heaven. She saw that well enough : 
she was no longer blind. But she only drew closer round 
him, as the adder round the wrist, as the creeper round the 
tree. 

For her passions might be weak, but she was strong. 

Moreover, the complexities and contradictions of his own 
nature were at war. He liked the very peril of his path ; he 
was glad once more to steal unseen by moonlight to a tryst 
that none could know ; long obliged to pass through a crowd 
under a blare of trumpets to a mistress who loved her vanity 
far more than he, this silence and solitude were precious to 
him. Silence and solitude are the twin divinities of love that 
guard its portals while it dreams ; but the Lady Joan detested 
them : like the old sovereigns of Borne, she thought no victory 
of worth without its triumph moving down the public ways. 
He had been bound so long behind her chariot, jaded and 
impatient of the throngs that jeer, that the sweet sense of 
imperious mastery both of the woman he loved and of the 
secret of his love came to him with the delight of variety, the 
charm of power. Etoile had seemed to him at first like Del 
Sarto’s Sebastian, with the palm and arrow, and uplifted eyes, 


FRIENDSHIP. 


453 


looking for higher things than earth can give. It was sweet 
to him to bend the palm and break the arrows and make the 
eyes sink earthward and see only his. 

The earth was once more sweet with the honey-smell of the 
golden tulips in the springing corn, and the darkness of the 
bay and the laurel was starred all over with little white 
blossoms, and springtime was here. 

Lady Joan sat alone in her Turkish room. 

It was dusky and heavy with the smell of stale smoke ; the 
flowers brought there faded in it. She did not care for the 
honey-smell of those cups of a gold she could not coin, and 
she only liked the bay and the laurel because their berries 
fattened the blackbirds for the market-stall. 

It simplifies life not to be a poet. 

She sat in the Turkish room all alone, and her face was 
dark, her eyes were clouded, her teeth were clinched. She 
knew how he spent the hours absent from her, and he was 
absent now. She was Argus-eyed, and had as many ears as 
Vishnu. She saw, heard, understood all that moved him, all 
that he concealed. She had borne it long and with the stern 
patience that only the consciousness of a great aim could give. 
She meant to have vengeance and Fiordelisa, — both the 
two sides of the shield that should hang up in the halls of her 
triumph. 

She sat in the darkened room, and thought. She was 
alone, and she knew where he was. It seemed to her as if 
her patience would burst its bonds, hex vengeance outstrip 
her wisdom, her heart break from her bosom : yet she was 
strong to keep silence. Until he spoke she would not speak. 
Time does so much and fate works so well for those who 
know how to wait ere they strike. 

The rumble from the streets filled her ears ; stray lines of 
sunshine shone in through the dusk of the room ; she thought 
of him there, at the feet of Etoile, under the green palms 
where the nightingales sang at eventide. . . . All these 
months he had fooled her thus ! 

In her black garb, with a silver dagger run through her 
dusky braids, with her stern lips close shut, and her eyes 
dark and stormy as a tempestuous midnight, she looked a 
woman to take a vengeance that should have rung through 
Europe, — to strike one blow, and see her lover dead, then 


454 


FRIENDSHIP. 


sheatlie the dagger in her breast. She looked so. As she 
sat, her clinched hand resting on a steel cuirass of old armor 
that lay near, her own namesake of D’Arc had not more 
bitter purpose on her brows, a Cleopatra infuriate had not 
more foiled fierce passion in her gloomy eyes. 

Alas ! the age is an age of prose, and she was in unison 
with her age. 

The old armor but lay there to be sold to a collector ex- 
pected on the morrow, and she, instead of wrenching the 
dagger from her hair, took out some letters. 

“ That will do,” she muttered, much as lago said, “ ’Twill 
serve.” 

In the many vicissitudes of her adventurous years she 
had made many friends ; she had made one in especial very 
useful to her. He was only a little common attorney, but he 
was a very clever little attorney ; not at law, of which he had 
left the public pursuit, though he kept its wisdom packed up 
in his brain, but in speculation, — vague and gorgeous specula- 
tions in distant unseen isles, whence it was easy to return, 
with silver-mines, and diamond-fields, and lodes of lead, and 
stories of savage princes with splendid palaces, but with gen- 
erous souls ; a quite invaluable little attorney : always running 
out above all to the Coral Isles that lie in the glow of the setting 
sun in the pellucid seas of the peaceful Pacific, and running 
back again with romantic Marco Polo stories, and producing 
any kind of prospectus to suit the money marts and ’changes 
of all countries; a little attorney that she corresponded with, 
caressed, petted, almost loved, because he was so useful to 
her, and called Theodore, with that pleasant touch of inti- 
mate friendship which had characterized her since the earliest 
days when mankind first became her “ brothers” under the 
shadow of Mount Lebanon. 

Her letters were from Theodore. 

He was not in the Coral Isles in the pellucid seas, but in 
the office that knew her so well in the many courts of the 
City of London. He had brought a gigantic enterprise from 
the Coral Isles, — an enterprise that was only as yet an idea, 
as even a leviathan at the commencement of its existence is 
an embryo. 

Lady Joan loved ideas, — when other people took them for 
facts. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


455 


The idea was to run railways through all the Coral Isles 
and steamers between them ; at least, not indeed to run them, 
because Theodore did not much think they would ever be 
made, but to obtain the concession for making them, which is 
all to which sensible people ever commit themselves. Theodore 
had peculiar advantages in the Coral Isles ; he had, or said he 
had, a few coral reefs, a few spice forests, a few sugar planta- 
tions, a few whole islands even ; perhaps he had a few savage 
wives also ; at any rate he had many royal savage friends in 
King Ooo-too-ta, and King Fi-fee-fa, and King Ze-zoo-za, and 
all the other dusky monarchs of the smiling seas. From Ooo- 
too-ta, and Fi-fee-fa, and Ze-zoo-za he meant to get all he 
wanted ; and the idea was already sown in many mercantile 
minds, — soil in which a very tiny seed springs up a giant 
pumpkin. Concessions are not as slow-growing as coral. 

It was of this that Theodore now wrote ; it was of this that 
Lady Joan thought instead of the dagger. She was a woman 
who was not conscious when she dropped from heroics to 
bathos. She was a woman who even in the depths of her 
bathos might look ridiculous, but yet never failed to strike 
home. 

With a dagger one may easily fail ; but with her vengeance 
in specie and speculation she never did. 

She sat and studied the letters of Theodore and other letters, 
her brow dark with wrath, and in her eyes ever and again a 
lightning-flash. 

The sheep that were sillier than swine were roaring like 
wolves from whom meat has been snatched. The transfer did 
not content them. The foreign workmen, English, Irish, and 
German, were swearing bitter oaths down by the shores of the 
Sirens’ seas because the new direction was about to employ 
native workmen ; and these foolish, fierce creatures, perhaps 
because they were in a land without beer or potatoes, were 
1 oaring louder than wolves, and could not be quieted. 

The roaring reached her ear through the means of her 
correspondents. It solaced, it almost soothed her. She knew 
it was almost madness to loris, — loris, who would not see the 
beauty and the excellence of the transfer ; loris, who felt re- 
morse and cared for honor. 

She put this and that together, her hand resting on the old 
steel cuirass. 


456 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Far away in the South were these ravening wolves that he 
thought it his duty to feed, because by his means they had 
come where they starved ; farther still in the West were these 
Coral Isles, with the spice forests, and the dusky kings, and 
the stores of vague and virgin wealth. She had devised a 
bridge across the waves of Messina : at a bound her imagina- 
tion and her will went wider afield, and threw a chain of con- 
nection from the Sicilian shores to the coral reefs. 

He should be told that the coral reefs should be made to 
feed the ravening wolves. 

He should go to the coral reefs. 

Weaker women might have deemed it as easy to uproot the 
dome of St. Peter’s and bear it over the mountains. But 
she quailed before no dijQ&culties ; she had compassed harder 
things. 

Having made Society accept herself, what was there too 
hard for her ? 

He should go to the coral reefs. 

As the eagle lifted Hanymede in its talons and bore him 
away, so should her mighty will uplift him in its claws and 
bear him to far isles and distant shores. If he would ever 
return who knew, who cared ? Shut in a secret drawer she 
had a foolish scrawl that left her, in event of his death before 
her, Fiordelisa. He had given it long ago ; he had half for- 
gotten it ; he attached no import to it. To a man still young. 
Heath seems so vague a word to play with, if it please a 
woman. 

“ He shall go,” she said, in her solitude, and her brow 
cleared. Since here her rival was, and his new love, and his 
fresh passion, and she saw no other means, from his own land 
he must depart. She did not pause to ask how she would 
move him ; she had done harder things. 

She drew her pen and ink to her and wrote to her Theodore 
in the dusky den. 

“ lo’s health has broken down under the strain of all this 
anxiety,” she wrote, in conclusion, “ he is so harassed with his 
wish to make it all up with the old shareholders. One cannot 
quarrel with so noble, if exaggerated, a sense of duty. I 
think this will be the very thing for him. I have not named 
it to him yet. When the whole affair is quite ripe then we 
will act; you will tell me. You had better come over; your 


FRIENDSHIP. 


457 


room is all ready. The voyage with you will do him good. 
Who knows ? Perhaps we may all come there some day. I 
have always wished to see those mango groves and those tur- 
quoise seas ever since I read ‘ The Earl and the Doctor.’ lo 
must make money somehow ; he has spent too much on those 
howling beasts whom he calls victims ; and I do very much 
fear, unless we can help him with these projects of yours, that 
his pictures will have to be sold, and his palace in the city too, 
and heaven only knows what else ! Come over, Theo, and be 
quick about it.” 

Then she signed “ Joan,” with a fine flourish. 

What did she want with a dagger ? 

Yet, the letter done, she sat sullen and gloomy whilst the 
sun died off her casements. 

Let vengeance be sweet as it will, it is never so sweet that 
it can smother the acid and bitter of humiliation and betrayal. 

She went out and posted her letters with her own hands, 
like the wise woman she was, and then she made a series of 
visits as the sun set. 

“ Go yourself if you please ; not I,” said loris, with petu- 
lant contempt, when he heard of this. He knew her Theo- 
dore as a common, scheming, shrewd, and vulgar little person, 
who had been distasteful to him, that was all. 

“ Of course I said it in jest,” she answered, being too wise 
to throw her cards on the table. “ The idea of my going ! 
The idea of my being anywhere except at dear old Fiordelisa 1 
But, jesting apart, amor mio^ have you any conception, I 
wonder, of how much you have thrown away on those work- 
men down by the sea ? I have been computing it all. I am 
afraid you will have to do something — unpleasant. Would 
you like me to tell you ’ 

“ Another time, another time,” he said, hastily. 

“ Very well,” said Lady Joan, with the marvellous patience 
to which she had braced herself. “ Only don’t blame me if 
you drift into trouble, that’s all. By the way, I want a gang 
of eighty new men put on to work at those new vineyards. 
Money ? You have money for those yelling brutes by the sea, 
but of course you have no money for useful work at home. 
By the way, lo, what do you think if our way of planting and 
irrigating were tried in the Pacific ? Theo tells me there are 
most astonishing capacities for production in the soil out there, 


458 


FRIENDSHIP. 


but all wasted in bad management, as your lands were till I 
took them in hand.” 

“ Take the savage isles in hand, then,” said loris, with 
roughness and contempt. 

She laughed good-humoredly. 

“ It’s a long way to go, and Fiordelisa can’t spare me yet,” 
she said. “ I never loved any spot on earth as I love Fiorde- 
lisa. How I long for April, to be living under the dear old 
roof once more! don’t you?” 

loris was silent. 

“ Since Fiordelisa is mine ” he began, with hesitation. 

“ What is yours is mine,” she said, as she smiled in his 
eyes. “ Ah, yes, dear, I know it is good of you to say it 
again, though Hush 1 Some one is coming.” 

It was Mr. Challoner who entered, his hands, as usual, filled 
with papers and newspapers. 

“ This is a very fine idea about the Pacific,” he said, in his 
most solemn manner. “ It promises extraordinarily well. 
White always knows. ... If one could get a capitalist to 
take it up and issue the shares. ... A beautiful climate, a 
delightful voyage, an interesting, unsophisticated people, a soil 
that is the garden of the world ” 

“ You are not writing the prospectus yet, Robert,” said his 
wife, dryly. “ I was asking lo if he would like the voyage. 
The voyage might do him good ; he looks so very ill. Those 
shipwrights worry him so.” 

“ I am almost inclined to go myself,” said Mr. Challoner, 
in his usual spirit of self-sacrifice. “ I believe there are very 
beautiful varieties of Nymphs&a to be found there, especially 
the Nymplisea rubra.'^ 

“ We’ll all go some day,” said the Lady Joan, with her 
happy decisiveness, — some day between vintage and spring- 
time, so as not to lose much of Fiordelisa.” 

loris stood between them and the familiar chamber that he 
had so long frequented, that stifled him between its stuff- 
draped walls, and the courage was wanting in him, though so 
strong the longing, to cry to them both, “ Let my future be 
quit of you ; stand off ! Let me be ruined, but let me at least 
be free 1” He stood silent, his head bent, his color changing 
as his desire strained against the weakness of his will. 

She flashed a glance at him from her keen eyes and read 


FRIENDSHIP. 


459 


his soul as though he spoke his thoughts. In years bygone 
she "would have burst into tempestuous reproach, into mad 
rage ; but, grown prudent with peril and cold in caution, she 
kept her patience still. 

“ We will all go together,” she said, with her frank and 
cheerful smile. “ You shall go for your water-lilies, Robert, 
and I for coral, and lo for a fortune. And we will bring the 
lilies, and the coral, and the fortune all back to Fiordelisa, 
and be happier than ever I” 

Mr. Challoner smiled benignly, as far as ever he could be 
said to smile. 

“We will go for the NympTi8e.a and the coral, certainly, if 
you like, my love,” he said, amiably. “ As for the fortune, 
loris must please himself. We have no right to persuade 
him or even suggest to him : he is his own master ; we are 
only his friends.” 

There was no one listening to be impressed by it ; but Mr. 
Challoner never dropped the stage toga and the stage tones 
even in the privacy of intimate friendship. 

“ Theodore, — you remember Theodore White ?” she said to 
several people. “ He was staying with us at Fiordelisa two 
years ago, and in the winter too. You know he has vast in- 
fluence in the Pacific; yes, in all those wondrous tropical 
spicy isles we read about and feel never to believe in ; he 
saved some savage king’s life there ; and he has great posses- 
sions there : and, indeed, he has a very fine idea, — nothing 
less than to create a network of steam communication from 
isle to isle ; in time it will make them quite a sea-confedera- 
tion. Theodore has great talent at combination. Would you 
like to be in it, anybody ? Well, I will tell you all about it, 
then, when I hear more. Theo will come over before he goes 
back to the Pacific. I fancy the scheme will interest lo. If 
it would only help him ! Alas ! yes, he has spent so much 
maintaining all those foreign navvies and shipwrights ; nobody 
else would have done it ; but he has such a noble sense of 
honor, and is always ready to sacrifice himself. Poor lo ! 
Really, if my husband did not restrain him a little he would 
ruin himself in a week. Mr. Challoner is always very gen- 
erous, too, but he is more practical than poor lo. W ouldn’t 
you like to see those coral islands and all the dear primitive, 
unsophisticated, childlike people ? I should.” 


460 


FRIENDSHIP. 


And she spoke thus in many different ways, in many suitable 
places, being a woman who always had the right regard for 
appearances, and knowing that when a vulture soars away with 
prey in its talons it should always look like an eagle — or a 
guardian angel — if possible. 

When many people were around them, she would jest and 
jeer at him. 

“ lo ?” she would cry. Oh, lo is to be made immortal 
in the Paris Salon, so they say. What a fine thing for him 
that he should have charmed a Muse ! Look at him : he is 
quite ashamed of all his glories. He is quite thankless, you 
see. Do you go to Etoile’s atelier ? No ? She lets no one 
in, they say; is that true? Well, I suppose she has her 
reasons. But they tell me if you do go you will see lo as 
Sordello, — lo in all kinds of studies and of casts. What it is 
to be enamored of him ! It must be quite delightful to be so 
much in love. I wish I could be ; but 1 never was.” 

And then she would laugh frankly and show her handsome 
teeth. 

“ Poor lo does not like it, — man’s ingratitude ! We call 
him Sordello ; it plagues him so ; he works himself into quite 
a rage when I chaff him about his conquest.” 

Then, with a touching regret and modesty, she would change 
her tone and lower her voice and say, — 

“ It is most painful, really, to us. We never thought we 
were preparing such distressing scenes for him when we asked 
her here ; he is so gentle and so trustful, one is always afraid 
he may fall into her hands at last. Oh, no, we never see her. 
My husband would not allow me. Of course one always con- 
cedes a great deal to genius; but still — and, after all, who 
knows if it be genius ? Some say it is only borrowed plumes. 
Yes, I am very sorry that she came to Rome.” 

Then she would take her mourning crape out of the throng 
of matrons and spinsters to whom she had thus spoken, and 
go away with a candid, cheerful smile, pointing to loris stand- 
ing aloof : 

“ Look at Sordello ! How pensive he is, and how bored he 
looks ! He must feel all the conspicuous unpleasantness of 
being a celebrity, — vicariously. Do go to her atelier and see 
if you can see the picture. But I believe she won’t let you 
in ; she has grown quite sauvage, they say. What a thing 


FRIENDSHIP. 


461 


it is to have a grand passion I Especially an unreturned 
one.” 

And she laughed so cheerily and contemptuously that Society 
never noticed that she drew the man she laughed at after her 
black skirts and took him home with her. 

“ Very well done, very well done indeed ; a little overdone, 
perhaps, a little over-acted, but clever, undeniably clever,” 
said Lady Cardiff, hearing and watching the same sort of 
speech and the same sort of sneer half a score of times in as 
many different houses. But Society was not as clear-sighted; 
Society thought that Lady Joan was always outspoken and 
frank, and was very naturally and very properly impatient of 
foolish sentiments to which she was herself too wise to stoop ; 
and Mr. Silverly Bell murmured, with a sigh, as he shook his 
head, — 

“ A woman that is all mind cannot understand the vagaries 
of unjustifiable passions. Talk to Joan Challoner of love ! 
she does not know what you mean, not she ! She is all mind.” 

Thus she was not idle, nor were her echoes idle either, in 
this tedious time of enforced seclusion, when she could trail 
her skirts through no cotillons and launch her cascade of con- 
fetti from no Carnival break, but could only go decorously to 
clergymen’s Lent breakfasts and spinsters’ tea-fights, and could 
only solace herself at home with guitar and cigars, with private 
purchases and public companies, with Fiordelisa and friend- 
ship. 

“Some one should tell Etoile,” said Lady Cardiff to Vera 
von Begenwalde. 

“ Tell Etoile? Who should tell her? We have not her 
confidence ; we do not even know what she and loris are or 
are not to each other.” 

“ Some one should tell her,” said Lady Cardiff, having for 
the fiftieth time heard the scoff and the sneer and the slander 
of Etoile’s enemy. 

“ It would be very difficult,” said Princess Vera. 

“ Difficult, perhaps, and I never meddle. Yet it is infamous 
that she should be jeered at by that black-browed audacity and 
not know it. It is true she tells me nothing, but I am sure that 
loris has entangled her without disentangling himself. It is 
what I foresaw he would do. It is of no use regretting, but 
it is melancholy. It is always women like that who suffer. 


462 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Those people with fine brains and with generous souls will 
never learn that life is after all only a game, — a game which 
will go to the shrewdest player and the coolest. They never 
see this ; not they ; they are caught on the edge of great 
passions and swept away by them. They cling to their aflec- 
tions like commanders to sinking ships and go down with them. 
They put their whole heart into the hands of others, who only 
laugh and wring out their lifeblood. They take all things too 
vitally in earnest. Life is to them a wonderful, passionate, 
pathetic, terrible thing that the gods of love and of death 
shape for them. They ’do not see that coolness and craft, and 
the tact to seize accident, and the wariness to obtain advantage 
do in reality far more in hewing out a successful future than 
all the gods of Greek or Gentile. They are very unwise. It 
is of no use to break their hearts for the world ; they will not 
change it. La culte de Vhumanite is the one of all others 
which will leave despair as its harvest. Laugh like Eabelais, 
smile like Montaigne ; that is the way to take the world. It 
only puts to death its Sebastians, and makes its Philips not 
sorrowful to see the boat is filling.” 

“ The boat shall not fill for her if I can help it,” said 
Princess Vera. “ I will try and tell her something.” 


CHAPTER XLVI. 

loRls left their house and went to his own. 

The portrait looked no longer on him from the wall ; he 
had removed it, giving her as the pretext that to have it hung 
there hurt her good name. In its stead hung a brown saint 
on a gold ground of some old tender and sombre Umbrian 
painter. 

But he always looked up to the place on the wall and 
felt the fierce eyes upon him, though they were there no 
more. 

The golden balls on the orange-boughs swayed against the 
open casement ; there was a soft blue sky such as Rafiaelle 
loved ; birds were singing. Spring had come. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


463 


He sat down and leaned his head on his arms. He felt 
ashamed and contrite, stung with remorse and conscious of 
cowardice ; weighed down, too, beneath a burden of obligation 
and of irrevocable errors. A shudder ran through him ; he 
felt exhausted with a sickly sense of fatigue. 

He knew very well that he was ruined, or would be in a 
very little space. It unnerved him and kept him mute and 
irresolute. It is easy to deride riches, but they give us a su- 
preme ease and force which without them are hard to attain. 
To hear her parcelling out the years to come, seizing and 
mortgaging his future, made him feel as the garroted slave 
felt when, bound and helpless, he heard Nero and Locusta talk 
before him how they would torture his living body and when 
and where. 

There were masses of unopened correspondence before him ; 
he turned from them with reluctance and aversion ; at this 
hour he was wont to be with Etoile, his hand ruffling the hair 
above her brows, his eyes watching her with a smile. 

In the pain and depression of the moment his heart almost 
hardened against her. 

“ She should not have listened to me,” he thought, with 
love’s captious ingratitude. “ I am not what she thinks me ; 
I never shall be.” 

Why had he not left the Muse aloof in the coldness of art? 
Why had he brought her mortal pains and joys ? His con- 
science reproached him, and his remorse made him capricious 
and unjust. 

“ Why did she trust me, why does she place her faith in 
me?” he thought. “ If she only knew me as I am ! ” 

And then all his heart went out to her in an ineffable 
tenderness. 

He thought of all he had seen and heard in Paris, of her 
works and the strength that was in them, and the many talents 
that the world wondered at, and the grace and the color of all 
things that she did, and the coldness that men blamed in her, 
hurt by her neglect ; and to him she was timid as the doe ; at 
a word he could make her heart flutter in her breast ; against 
him she had no more strength than has a flower in the hand 
that holds it. 

Yet almost he wished he had never loved her, nor she 
him. 


464 


FRIENDSHIP. 


Suddenly the door of his chamber opened, and in the ruddy 
glow of the light from the setting sun he saw her. 

He rose appalled by the look on her face, and knowing that 
to bring her to his house there must be some great and sudden 
cause at work. 

Her hair was ruffled about her eyes, that were dark and 
wet; her lips were very pale. She came hurriedly towards 
him ; her hands trembled as they touched him. 

“ I have come ; perhaps I have done wrong ; I could not 
wait for your coming to me. They make a by-word of my 
name in that house of hers, I hear, and they say you stand 
by silent. Is it true ? It cannot be true. You are not a 
coward.” 

His conscience made the word smite like a sword: he grew 
as pale as she. 

“ Is this your faith ?” he said, in evasion, and he put her 
hands away as if in anger. 

“ It cannot be true,” she muttered, feverishly. “ In society, 
I hear, they say (it is a common jest) that she says foul things 
of me, and that you listen ; that you let her speak so of me ; 
that you deny — deny ” 

“ Deny what ?” 

“ What we are to each other.” 

“ None knows what we are to each other ; is it not the very 
charm of our love ? Who has said this to you ?” 

“ A woman who is my friend, yours too ; she has heard it 
some time ; at last she told me. My beloved, it is not true?” 

“What is not true?” said loris, with impatience and con- 
fusion. “ I cannot understand what you mean. Where have 
your beautiful calmness and lucidity gone ? It is unlike you 
to tilt at wind-mills, to split straws.” 

“ I do not. But can it be true that you — you ! — let her 
calumniate me?” 

He moved angrily and looked away at the sun setting 
behind his orange-trees. 

His conscience stung him bitterly, and he took refuge in 
affected indignation and sternness. 

“ How should I know what she says or what she does ? 
What is her house more than any other house ? I was never 
her keeper.” 

Her lips parted with a deep, quivering breath. She would 


FRIENDSHIP. 465 

have spoken, but he saw his advantage in his anger, and so 
pursued it. 

“ Is this your trust in me ? A moment’s idle gossip from 
some fool, and you believe me capable of any baseness.” 

“ You swore to me not to go to her, yet you were with her 
in Paris.” 

She spoke very low, under her breath, but the unmeant re- 
proach struck him like a scourge. 

“ I was with her in Paris. Yes. I avowed it, I myself ; I 
told you I had sinned, and you forgave the sin. What is for- 
giveness worth if its ghost rises in reproach like this ? You 
have said I am a coward ” 

“ I said you were not.” 

“ You said it so as to mean I was one. What has come to 
you ? whom have you been hearkening to ? Is it you who 
speak of me with strangers, with dolts and idiots and slan- 
derers ? You ? Can I help what is said in her house ? She 
hates you because I love you. Can you complain of that? 
She has a bitter tongue, and is a bitter foe ; I told you so long 
since. I cannot help her saying what she chooses. In Paris 
I struck two men because they spoke of you too lightly ; I 
cannot strike her : she is a woman. A woman unsexed, if 
you will, but still a woman ; she must say what she will.” 

“ But you must leave her.” 

She spoke very low, but her voice was firm ; her eyes shone 
through their mist with a strong, steadfast light. 

“ You live in solitude until you dream these things. You 
are too much alone,” he said, with that manlike inconsistency 
which turns the obedience it has commanded into a fault and 
makes of it a reproach. “ Why do you not go into the world 
as you did when I met you ? It would be better, wiser far. 
It would keep you from these brooding fancies.” 

“ When you are not with me I am best alone,” she answered 
him ; “ you know that so well. Besides, — besides, I cannot 
risk seeing you beside her ; I could not bear it.” 

He looked past her out to where the golden fruit of his 
garden hung in the dusky light. 

“ What folly !” he said, uneasily. “ You are everything to 
me, she is nothing. Is not that enough ?” 

“ The world thinks me nothing. She is everything.” 

“ You are perverse,” said her lover, irritably, 
u* 


466 


FRIENDSHIP. 


His color changed. 

“ I have left her in every sense you can mean. Do you 
think — can you think for one moment that you need be jeal- 
ous of herf' 

“ Jealous !” 

She echoed the word in an infinite scorn. It seemed to 
lower her to the level of the woman she spoke of, to sink 
her all at once to the intrigues and baseness of low thoughts 
and of gross passions. Jealous ! — she ! — who had found him 
in his captivity and learned from him to disdain the tyrant 
who chained him in it ! 

“ I do not think that I am jealous,” she said, coldly. “ That 
is not the word to use between us. Can I be jealous of what 
so long ago you told me was a weariness and a shame to you ? 
No, it is not that.” 

“ It is that,” he said, with a passing amusement in her pain. 
“ Yes. You are jealous, my proud one. But you need not 
be. I cannot break with her just yet entirely, — as a friend, I 
mean, — not yet, because of all the meshes that hold me, all 
that she knows of, all we are embarked in : I have told 
you so. As for her calumny, how can I tell what she may 
say ? She speaks in her own tongue ; it passes me as the wind 
does. What spirit has changed you, that you become like 
other women all at once and stoop to their low level and listen 
to the chatter of the world ? I thought you never would have 
wronged me so. It is not worthy of you. What, you, my 
Muse, a listener to babbling, drivelling rumor-mongers ! Oh, 
for shame !” 

A faint smile came on her face ; she looked at him, and all 
her love was in the look. “ Dear, if you give your word it is 
enough for me.” 

His eyes did not meet hers. 

“ I have given it. Let it be enough.” 

A spasm of doubt ached through her heart, but she was 
silent. 

“ Forgive me,” she murmured, after a pause. “ I did not 
think, indeed, that you could hear any ill of me and be mute, 
— and ill from her ! — but yet the mere thought hurt me so. 
Forgive me that I did you any wrong.” 

“I forgive,” he murmured, — he who had done the wrong, — 
and kissed her. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


467 


For the first time she shrank a little from him. 

“ Wait,” she said, wearily. “ Does she not know the truth 
yet?” 

“ No. I never speak of you ; it is best so — yet.” 

“ It is always — a little longer.” 

“ Were I not half ruined it should be to-night.” 

“ How can she keep or hinder you?” 

“ The woman that is forsaken is an enemy : she is the 
bitterest the world ever saw.” 

Etoile raised herself and looked at him once more. She 
was still very pale. 

“But you will forbid her Fiordelisa ? That at least, — 
for me.” 

He was silent. 

A certain resolve and imperious will, that he had never seen 
there, which if he had seen it oftener might have saved him- 
self and her, came on her face as she gazed at him. 

“ You will keep her from Fiordelisa, if you love me, — now.” 

“ I will. That I swear to you.” 

He spoke hastily, but he spoke with resolution. 

Then she went away from this house which she scarcely 
ever entered, and in which she always stayed unwillingly, 
because it seemed to her, like Fiordelisa, desecrated and 
usurped by the memory of a dead, base passion. 

When she passed out into the red evening light two dusky 
figures were hastening by on the other side of the street. 

“ There are her watchdogs,” he muttered. “ They have seen 
you. You should not have come. I should have been with 
you ere the sun set.” 

He bowed to her ceremoniously, standing with uncovered 
head. Her horses bore her away through the red glow towards 
her home. 

The watchdog hurried to the Casa Challoner. 

“ I have proof positive, dearest, now !” that admirable 
watcher cried. “ She came out of his house — out of it — we 
both saw her — five minutes since !” 

The eyes of the Lady Joan grew cold. 

“ I know it, dear,” she answered, tranquilly. “ She is always 
going to his house. What can lo do more than show her out 
again? He is a gentleman and too gentle-hearted, else he 
might do something rougher.” 


468 


FRIENDSHIP. 


“ But it is disgraceful !” 

“ Oh, yes; but what can one expect?” 

“ It is disgraceful !” And the watchdog’s back was up and 
his teeth set, — in the interests of morality, of course ; nothing 
more. 

Lady Joan smiled, still coldly. 

“ Poor lo ! he would think a Paris Corinna a Tenth Muse 
and an innocent recreation, and he gets his punishment ! It 
is really hard on him, though, to be so persecuted just because 
he made himself a little pleasant in my house to a stranger. 
You know lo’s pretty manner, dear; you know it means 
nothing.” 

Then she went out into society, and said much the same 
thing, — more cautiously or more slightingly, as her prudence 
told her was best. She did not go out very much, being still 
ostensibly in deep grief, but she saw a very large number of 
persons, and to most of them contrived to say, “ Etoile ? Oh, 
yes, I don’t know her this winter : I do not like to know her, 
you see, after all my poor father told me. Great genius ? Oh, 
yes ! that, of course, though it is odd she paints nothing here. 
But I believe she is in love with our poor friend loris, — yes, 
loris, that you so often see about our house : she took a fancy 
to him, meeting him two or three times, and has left him no 
peace ever since. We laugh at him very much. It makes 
him so angry, because really he never thought twice about 
her. But artists are always like that.” 

Marjory did know, — had known to her cost, — sighed a little, 
and was silent. 

“ Will you not speak to him ?” she said, hesitatingly. “ It 
is really disgraceful !” 

Lady Joan laughed outright. 

“ Speak to him ? Not 1 1 What is that to me ? It serves 
him right ; he would play with edged tools. All that matters 
to you and me, dear, is not to know Etoile ; and we don’t 
know her. Let lo take care of himself, if he has got into 
any trouble through imprudence.” So, she would say, with a 
broad smile and a frank laugh, a hundred times a week, and 
going homeward, casting off her mask, would lock herself in her 
own chamber, and weep, and rave, and moan in all the fury and 
the feebleness of a woman that knows herself betrayed and for- 
saken. But she was stubbornly brave and coldly wise. The 


FRIENDSHIP. 


469 


fit over, the storm passed ; she picked up the mask and put it 
on again, and when she saw loris still met him as though she 
knew nothing, and was full of eagerness and news about the 
brood-mares at Fiordelisa and the coral of the South Sea Isles. 

Meanwhile Etoile paced up and down her old gray terraces 
under the evening skies with a bitter sense of humiliation and 
of bewilderment, though passion had bound its bands upon 
her eyes and kept them so long closed. She had seen prevari- 
cation and trouble upon his face as he had listened to her, and 
had not seen the frank, firm indignation of a man wrongfully 
accused. 

For calumny she cared nothing. 

It was like a hot wind, bringing sand and pestilence, no 
doubt, but she had never heeded it ; she had kept the doors 
of the house of her life closed against it, and had always 
thought that it had only power to harm the feeble. But cal- 
umny that he had stood by and heard ! — that hurt her like a 
blow ; not for itself, but to think that he could let it pass un- 
punished, that he could let the woman he despised utter it 
unrebuked. 

A sudden consciousness fell on her with a heavy weight of 
pain that all unwittingly she had failed to loosen the bands 
about his fate, and had only bound the chains about her own ; 
failed, as high natures and dreamful lives so often fail where 
the harder, shrewder, meaner temper aims aright and conquers. 

She looked at her canvas and her marble and smiled very 
wearily. 

“ Any fool had been wiser than I !” she thought, and her 
heart ached with sad derision of itself. 


40 


470 


FRIENDSHIP. 


CHAPTER XLVII. 

Between them from that day there fell a certain shadow 
of restraint. 

He began 

“ That drifting slow apart, 

All unresisted, unrestrained, 

Which comes to some when they have gained 
The dear endeavor of their soul : 

As two light skiffs that sailed together. 

Through days and nights of tranquil weather, 

Adown some inland stream might be 
Drifted asunder each from each, 

When, floating with the tide, they reach 
The hoped-for end, the promised goal. 

The sudden glory of the sea.” 

In him the consciousness of error was a daily burden ; into 
her the anguish of doubt had entered like an injected poison. 
When they met there was a name they could not speak, a 
memory they strove in vain to exorcise. Uneasily he affected 
a serenity he could not command ; vainly she tried to show a 
faith she could not feel. The restlessness of conscious dis- 
loyalty was in him ; the restlessness of perpetual apprehension 
was with her. The infinite charms of perfect freedom and of 
perfect faith were gone. He knew that he was not wholly 
true, and she feared it. 

“ I am a coward in her eyes !” he thought ; and the thought 
stung him because of the truth there was in it ; and he felt 
angered against her because she had been courageous always 
and could not comprehend the hesitations and vacillations of 
his nature which unnerved him and kept him halting and 
mute before his tyrant. To say the truth simply because the 
truth it was seemed to her so easy and to him so hard. 

“ You do not understand,” he would say to her, irritably ; 
and she would be silent, wishing not to wound him ; and so 
“ the rift within the lute” was made, and its music became 
mute. 


FRIENDSHIP. 


471 


Circe brewed her simples and changed men to swine. His 
destroyer was no sorceress, but she had a brutalizing and 
enervating power, as every grosser nature has when once it 
fastens on what is at once loftier yet weaker than itself. 

He would leave Etoile vowing to himself to see his tyrant 
no more, to let her take lands and repute and everything she 
chose from him, but to force her to leave him free ; he would 
go to her, meaning it in all firmness and fervor of resolve. 
Then that all-pervading, all-destroying influence that was in 
his life, as the smell of the camphor-wood in tho chamber, 
would seek him out and environ him and emasculate him, and 
he would be once more untrue to his fairest faith, and once 
more heart-sick of himself and the woman who mastered him, 
and ashamed before himself and before the woman that he 
loved. 

“ She shall never go to my home again,” — so he had vowed ; 
yet as the spring stole on and the old ways were trodden by 
her with sure feet, and she laughed and talked of Fiordelisa 
and the summer and the future, his nerves seemed paralyzed : 
he kept silent. 

What more did she want ? Nothing. 

Silence gives consent. ' 

Feebler women would have read his aversion in his glance, 
known his desire from his absence, understood his reluctance 
from his silence, but she cared for none of these things. She 
knew all that they meant, but she had shaped her course and 
abided by it. Long before hanging her cashmere in his en- 
trance-hall she had resolved to stay there for ever and aye. 
Should so mere a reed as his own wish combat the stubborn 
steel of her will ? Never ! 

He was silent, and she took her course. 

Great is the power of stubbornness, and greater yet that of 
silence. 

Love shall fail, honor shall droop, manliness shall cower, 
dignity and uprightness shall perish, but these powers shall 
endure and conquer the powers of the brazen brow and of the 
brazen tongue. Chi dura vince. 

“ You are above me; why did you ever stoop to me?” he 
murmured once to Etoile, and felt the thing he said. He 
hated the lower life, the grosser aims, the coarser thoughts, 
the looser creeds of the other life that had been so long by 


472 


FRIENDSHIP. 


his; and yet the higher in its turn oppressed and troubled him. 
“ You are like the edelweiss : one must come so high to grasp 
you,” he said, smiling ; yet though he smiled he felt a sense 
of strain, and of an atmosphere too clear for eyes long used 
to the mistier air of lower levels. 

For the first hours of all passion there is a supreme exulta- 
tion which sustains and intoxicates ; but these hours passed, 
habit and old association reassert themselves, and, if they be 
of gross fibre, will draw grossly downward the nature which 
temporarily escaped them. 

With Etoile he had been happier than he had ever been in 
all his years ; but, had she been a lower woman than she was, 
she would have kept him more constant, more content, and, 
measuring the forces against her better, would better have 
defeated them. 

As it was, she loved him, gave all to him, trusted him, and 
lost him, perhaps by her own fault. She thought it her own 
fault always. Who does not that loves ? 

Once more the fiowers grew thick in the grassy ways ; the 
grape-blossom was once more on the vine, and once more the 
Campagna was a tossing sea of flowers, with white acacia for 
the foam. Shut in her gardens of Rocaldi, Etoile left the 
world to say of her what it might, what it would ; and in the 
warmth and the oppressiveness of the city her rival, warier, 
wiser, colder, and more cautious, smiled on the world and 
said, — 

“ I shall soon be at Fiordelisa ; Effie is so fond of Fiorde- 
lisa : we all are. Yes, I have saved it for poor lo, — really I 
may say I have saved it. It is so pleasant to be of use to a 
friend.” 

The world cast a stone at the shut gates of Rocaldi ; it 
nodded cheerfully to the open gates of Fiordelisa. The world 
does not like to be ignored ; and it never forgives a closed 
door. Lady Joan knew that well, and she threw her doors 
open. 

“ Look how frank and careless she is. As if there could 
be any sin in a woman so candid as that !” said the world, in 
return for her concession ; but of Etoile, aloof, indifferent, 
going by with mute disdain and absent thoughts, it was will- 
ing to believe any evil. Why not? She did nothing to 
amuse it ; she did not even pay it the compliment of fear. 


FRIENDSHIP, 


473 


Meanwhile, as the keen gray eyes of his tyrant flashed in 
the eyes of that yet harder tyrant, the world, and her clear, 
ringing, rough tones cried twenty times a day to Society, 
“We are going to Fiordelisa, — yes 1 you must come to Fior- 
delisa,” the heart of loris as he heard sank as a stone sinks 
under the waves. 

Any hesitation, any anxiety, any interrogation from her, 
and he would have hurled the truth at her and have let her 
do her worst ; but in the cool assumption of right as a matter 
of course there lies an irresistible power ; it makes a con- 
queror of the mortal as of the nation that knows aright all 
its force. 

She never gave him the chance of any moment of doubt in 
her own perfect title ; she spoke, she wrote, she worked, she 
schemed, she planned, she prophesied, sweeping all the future 
into the measure of her sight, as one conscious of a kingdom 
that no enemy could invade nor any accident diminish. In 
its own small way it was an almost superb insolence of posses- 
sion ; in her own heart she was on fire with rage, thrilled 
through and through with dread, and knew that any instant 
her throne might fall and her exile might begin, but she never 
let one sign of this knowledge escape her. Hour on hour, 
day after day, she smiled steadily at him and at the world, 
and said, — 

“ Fiordelisa ! dear Fiordelisa ! yes, we are going there. We 
think we shall winter there ; we mean to live and die there. 
It is a dear old place.” 

She knew all that he did, every hour that he spent else- 
where, every letter that was written to him ; she found means 
to know everything, being once on the track of his infidelity ; 
but no single sign of all she knew ever escaped her ; she had 
even self-command enough to hold her peace and never re- 
proach him for his absence, never upbraid him for his coldness, 
but go on steadily in her old ways,. with her scales and her 
stud-book, her ledgers and her steam-engines, her noisy econo- 
mies and her showy extravagances. 

Love ? She knew its feebleness well. It will burst through 
a tempest and break down a wall of ice, but against the dull, 
impenetrable, commonplace sand-heap of a changeless routine 
it falls back powerless as the lofty, impetuous waves of the sea 
fall back from the massed earth of a level dike. 

40 * 


474 


FRIENDSHIP. 


The waves fret themselves in vain : the dike conquers. 

In her own strange way she still loved him ; in her own 
sullen way she now hated him ; but hate and love both sub- 
sided before her resolve to keep her hold on his life and on 
Fiordelisa. Besides, it was a form of vengeance, — the widest 
and the heaviest vengeance she could take ; and even in her 
fury she was shrewd and wise. 

So the oxen began to drag the household gods once more 
towards the old gray walls on the hill-side, and once more she 
began to prepare for her summer sojourn ; and loris, hearing 
and knowing, felt his heart stand still as he remembered that 
he had sworn that no more should she ever dwell under his 
dead mother’s desecrated roof. 

“ That at least, if you love me !” had said Etoile. And he 
loved her ; yet he stood by and saw the oxen go, the exodus 
begin. 

“ My wife !” he murmured to Etoile, still with his arms 
about her, when once more the nightingales began their song; 
and in all honesty he meant still to “ vindicate her honor to 
the world,” and give her all he had to give in answer for her 
sacrifice to him of peace, and fame, and use, and art. 

But meanwhile the wife of another pursued her shunned 
and guilty way, and went across his threshold, and sat by his 
hearth, and laughed, and claimed his future. And the cour- 
age was lacking in him that was needed to thrust her from 
his doors ; and the courage was also lacking in him to lift up 
before the world as his nearest and dearest the life that through 
him the world had calumniated. 

For the courage thus needed was of another fibre than that 
which fears no battle. 

Though there were many times when he longed to let the 
world know how he and he alone had had power to “ break 
the nautilus shell” and make a captive of what other men 
had found beyond their reach, there were other times when 
the base, noxious vapors of slander found their way to him 
and stifled his higher resolves. He never doubted that they 
were more than vapor ; but he knew that such vapor is the 
world’s breath, and he had not courage to thrust his hand 
down the dragon’s throat and tear out its pestilential tongue. 

The triumph of being beloved by a woman whom the 
world had crowned was precious to him ; but the courage of 


FRIENDSHIP. 475 

being true to a woman whom the world also slandered was not 
in his nature. 

Morning, noon, and night, wherever he went, wherever he 
moved, wherever a group was gathered together, or a dispute 
of voices fell on his ear, she whose interest it was to divorce 
him from Etoile contrived, with her many echoes, that he 
should perpetually hear some innuendo, some falsehood, some 
foulness set afloat by her, and living the lusty life that a lie 
does live in common with other blatant, poisonous things. He 
knew that lies they were, and yet he recoiled from meeting 
them with an open blow, a fierce denial. His love had always 
been rather triumph than tenderness. Love that is chiefly 
triumph is usually captious and exacting, and apt to quarrel 
with the very good it craves. 

So he hesitated, so he waited, so he trusted to chance to cut 
the knots into which his fall had entangled itself, and he 
forgot that chance only favors those strong enough to com- 
pel it. And meantime he let the bronzed, frank face of his 
destroyer smile up to his, and let her fierce voice cry un- 
challenged, — 

“ We go to Fiordelisa !” 

He did not mean to let her go ; with the hand of Etoile in 
his he dreamed of another life for his old home ; but mean- 
time the moments and the hours and the days slipped away, 
and he only reached a double infidelity, a dual treason, and 
began to turn uneasily from the clear gaze of the eyes he had 
kissed into blindness. Perhaps no crime, no sin, no fault, no 
folly brings so much woe as does the one terrible error of 
irresolution. 

It is an acid that eats away all the gold of life, imperceptibly 
but surely, till we are left with empty hands, quite beggared, 
and only look to our loss when to know it is all too late. 

loris stood irresolute, with strong force of desire but no 
strong force of action, wishing, waiting, playing with his fate ; 
and fate fell on him and crushed him, as it always crushes 
those who do not seize and make it bless them. 

There came one hot and sickly day, when, though it was 
in springtime, there was dearth and sorrow in the heavy gray- 
ness of the air. 

Etoile stood alone in her studio. 

The Sordello stood still incomplete, but pure and brilliant 


476 


FRIENDSHIP. 


in its color as though it had been conceived in Venice in 
days of the Republic and the Renaissance. There were other 
studies ; there were casts in clay ; there was a head in marble : 
they all had the same features. 

“ Dear, you have made me a woman, but you have killed 
me as an artist,” she said, half aloud, as she looked on them, 
too true an artist not to know her loss. 

Her eyes were wet as she looked. 

The loss of the power of fancy to the artist is like the loss 
of its wings to the bird. 

She walked restlessly to and fro the stones of the floor. 

Once — was it yesterday, or was it a score of years away ? 
— she had flown to her work when the day broke with such 
strong joy in it that she never felt physical fatigue or solitude 
or any flight of time. Now, — she only listened for one step. 
When she heard it not, the long, pale, weary day seemed cold 
as death, empty as a rifled grave. 

This day he had not come ; it had passed and gone without 
one moment that recorded joy or use; she was ashamed at her 
own apathy and feebleness, but they were stronger than she : 
she could not strive against them : she felt an unspeakable 
depression and foreboding that deepened as the days wore on. 
Why would he not speak? Why would he not be true ? To- 
gether they were happy, — yes ; but behind them, like a sullen 
shadow, always stood the memory of that fierce and furious 
passion that was betrayed. 

“ If I told her the truth ?” she thought ; and then her 
heart misgave her, and she was afraid the mere thought had 
been disloyal to him, as if doubtful of his good faith. 

It was not for her to speak when he kept silent; and 
yet 

She felt humiliated and stung with a sense of outrage to 
think that he would not rise and say, “ This is where my love 
lies now, and all my trust and honor.” 

Now and then, seeing far off in a street-crowd or at a 
chamber window the face of her foe, she had felt a sickening 
thrill of pain, — not jealousy, as he thought ; not jealousy, — 
who can be jealous of what they know is scorned ? — but some 
such impetuous hatred and disgust as she would have felt at 
seeing a snake wind up about his limbs and she doomed to 
look on the while and powerless to stir. 


FRIENDSHIP. 477 

He did not understand that ; he only thought her jealous. 
Men see but a little way into the hearts of women. 

As he sat at her feet and leaned his head on her knees he 
thought he understood her, because he did only too fatally 
understand that he was the master of her fate, the single 
thought of her entire existence ; but he did not understand 
her aright, because he thought the feeling which moved her 
against her foe was the mere restless jealousy of her sex, 
whereas it was the far deeper and far more noble hatred of 
the nature that was true and bold for the nature that was 
false and base. 

“ If she had ever loved you truly once I could have for- 
given her from my heart, even if she had killed me,” she had 
said to him. He had smiled and kissed her, but he had not 
understood. 

He had thought it a mere pretty poetic exaggeration of 
words. He had said to himself that no women ever forgive 
each other to whom the same lover is dear. 

This day he did not come ; the morrow passed, and he was 
still absent. It was gray, heavy, sickly weather, that not even 
the outburst of blossom and flower could beautify. She 
counted the hours till her heart grew sick. 

The nightingales began their earliest notes in the palms at 
evening ; she closed the casements against the song ; she could 
not bear to hear it — alone. It seemed to her that the time 
grew very long, that his silence lasted till it became dishonor 
to them both. 

“ If I were to tell her ?” she thought again and again ; 
and then the thought seemed to her to be a base one, to be 
like a betrayal of him ; and she rejected it, and felt ashamed 
of it. 

Another day came and there was no word of him. She 
wrote, and then tore up all she wrote, being unwilling to seem 
to imitate the exactions and the persecutions of her rival. 
With her he should be always free. 

She would not cage her nightingale. 

The sun was low and red, the air was dull ; she walked 
through the blue flag-lilies that once more filled the grass, and 
her heart was sick with foreboding. 

It seemed to her that any fool had been wiser than she had 
been. 


478 


FRIENDSHIP. 


He was not changed ; when with her he was passionate 
and tender as when the blue lilies had bloomed in the year 
before, but she had learned that cruel truth which all women 
who themselves love greatly do learn, that a victorious love is 
not as eager nor as suppliant as a love that hopes yet fears. 

She had had no strength, and with him she should have 
been very strong. From her terraces she could see in the 
blue distance the old gray towers of Fiordelisa amidst the 
dark cypress and ilex-woods of its hill-side. She looked at 
the dusky cloud that she knew were those woods, and she 
felt comforted. 

“ There at least she will never go,” she thought ; ‘‘ and 
when he forbids her Fiordelisa she will know the rest.” 

And she plucked one of the azure irises and put it in the 
white folds of her dress. Just so had he set one there last 
year, and he would surely, she thought, come this evening. 

She walked to and fro while the sun sank out of sight 
and the mists of the falling night hid Fiordelisa from her 
sight. 

A servant brought her a message, — one of those brief 
messages that flash the woe of a life in a few curt, bold 
words. 

The message told her that her old home in Paris had, by an 
accident, been burned to the ground, — nothing saved but her 
statue by Clesinger. And, since misfortunes never come alone, 
there were other tidings that a man of business who had con- 
ducted her affairs had robbed her and fled. 

Her first thought was of him. 

“ Will he mind very much ?” she thought. It made her 
much poorer. She stood a while with the message in her 
hand, thinking always of him. 

Her old treasures had been dear to her, and the things of 
her art dearer still, and the place had been full of them, but 
it was only of him that she thought. She awoke as from a 
trance and saw the servant waiting there. 

“ Tell them to get the horses,” she said, quickly. It was 
evening ; in ten minutes more it would be night. She threw 
some black laces around her head, and when the horses were 
ready drove down into Home. 

It was already dark. 

To tell her lover was her first impulse ; to do what he 


FRIENDSHIP. 479 

thought best ; also not to let him for one moment deem her 
richer than she was. 

A woman who is the mistress of a great fame is never alto- 
gether poor ; but she had lost all that she had saved ; she had 
little left save the power of her hand. 

The horses flew on through the dark down into the heart 
of Rome, to the banks of the river, where the lamps were all 
lit, and lights were gliding to and fro on the bridges. 

loris was not at his house. 

She had asked where he had gone — the first time that she 
had ever asked a question about him. The man, who knew 
a little and guessed more, and hated the woman for whom for 
many years he had had to do so much unpaid service, threw 
his hands in the air and laughed. 

“ Where should he be but at the Casa Challoner ? He 
came in with milady about five o’clock, and they went out 
together.” 

Etoile said nothing ; she leaned back on the cushions pale 
and cold ; she felt as if the speaker had stabbed her. 

“ To the Casa Challoner,” she said, in a cold, clear voice to 
her coachman. 

The servant standing in the doorway heard and was fright- 
ened ; the horses trotted onwards towards the Corso in the 
moonlight and gaslight and the deep shadows of Rome. 

All memory of the losses that had befallen her faded out of 
her mind ; all she was conscious of was that he was there, — 
there ! — with all his oaths forsworn. 

A very sickness of disgust came on her ; the fierce steel- 
like eyes, the smoke-tainted lips, the twanging guitar, the large 
firm hands, the loud rough laugh, all that he abhorred, all that 
he was with, rose before her in imagination till all her blood 
leaped to a scornful hatred she had never known; and the 
deep blue of the skies above her seemed to her full of fire. 
She had lost much, she had been robbed, half ruined ; what 
of that ? She forgot it. She only remembered that her lover 
was faithless. 

It was one of those moments for which the world blames 
women bitterly, yet for which they are not to blame, for in 
their pain they are scarce conscious what they do, and are 
driven on by sheer swift instincts that they have no power to 
control. 


480 


FRIENDSHIP. 


To go there, to find him there, to cast the truth down 
between them and see which he would cleave to, to fling at 
her foe all the scorn, all the disdain, all the knowledge kept 
down so long in silence, — this one impulse alone governed 
her as she let her horses trot through the still night towards 
the Temple of the Virtues. * 

In the moonlight, before the doorway of the house, there 
were two wagons with teams of low gray oxen, and the wagons 
were piled high. There was a pause and some altercation : the 
wagons stopped the way. 

“ We are loading them with milady’s boxes and other things,” 
the servant of the house said to her coachman. “ AVe all go 
up to Fiordelisa to-morrow. Does your mistress wish to call 
at this time of night ? Well, I do not know ; I can ask her. 
There is nobody up there but the Prince loris.” 

Then the man laughed, as servants laugh at such things in 
Italy, and signed the oxen back and went into the doorway. 

“ Drive away !” said Etoile ; then she stopped her horses 
again in a by-street, and descended from the carriage, and 
walked on alone under the stars. 

The coarse laugh of the serving-man had checked the im- 
pulse that had brought her to this place ; she felt heart-sick 
with shame ; he was there, — he ! her own, her idol, her treas- 
ure that outweighed the world ! — he was there, at the feet of 
the woman he had renounced. 

Even in that moment of bitterest anguish she did not 
deceive herself ; she knew well that nothing that need move 
her to jealousy drove him there, but only the hesitation of 
temperament, the habit of dominion, the dread of a virago’s 
rage. But all the courage of her own nature leaped up in 
scorn. He loved her, yet he had spent the starry hours of the 
early night in reluctant submission to the unholy bonds he had 
abjured, in cowardly counterfeit of a passion he had renounced 
and lived to loathe ! 

And her rival went to Fiordelisa. 

The insult entered her very soul like iron. 

She was to go to Fiordelisa, this woman whom he had for- 
saken and renounced ; to live in his home, to be near him all 
the summer through, to reign there at her will I The outrage 
of it seemed to her past all endurance. 

If the woman he had renounced were to be thus allowed to 


FRIENDSHIP. 481 

rule him, what was she herself? less than the very dust in his 
eyes, surely, or never would he thus insult her. 

In the moment of that intense pain, that intense humilia- 
tion, Etoile lost her serenity, her patience, her long-suffering 
tenderness for him. She felt fooled and dishonored. For the 
first time since she had felt his lips touch hers she thought of 
herself, and not of him. 

Such moments of profound self-abasement come to all. She 
had been proud and loyal and of infinite truthfulness and 
faith ; she felt betrayed and stung beyond endurance. 

She walked up and down in the clear moonlight that had 
succeeded to the gray and oppressive day. She had utterly 
forgotten the losses that had fallen on her. The dark and 
quiet corner where the house of her foe stood was quite de- 
serted now. The oxen had gone away, and their loads with 
them. The arched doors stood open. The porter had gone 
also down the street. The lamps gleamed in the entrance. 
The casements above were all lighted : there came from them 
the echo of a guitar and the sound of a voice humming amor- 
ous songs of the populace. 

Etoile stood in the moonlight, without, by the open doors, 
and hesitated. If she were to find them together, and fling 
the truth down between them like a gauntlet? . . . Would it 
be freedom for him, or would it be merely vengeance, a vulgar 
vengeance, worthy of her foe, and not of her ? 

She stood by the door in the shadow, swayed now by one 
impulse, and now by another, yielding at one moment to the 
natural, common instinct of a passion that was wronged, re- 
strained at the other by the higher temper of a love that 
shrank from base contention of its rights. 

The night was very still ; there was no one near ; above the 
steep overhanging walls the stars shone. On the stillness the 
melodious thrill of the guitar struck clearly from the cham- 
bers above ; then even that ceased. On the silence she heard 
a little laugh, and then a murmuring voice ; the laugh was her 
rival’s ; the voice was his. 

She shuddered, and moved from the threshold, and felt 
defamed and dishonored. 

He could laugh there ! — he, who had said to her, “ Make 
me what you think me, what you wish me ; — I am yours !” 

She walked up and down the stones of the little square 
V 41 


482 


FRIENDSHIP. 


before the doors, that still stood open, yet she did not enter : 
it seemed to her so vile, so poor a thing to do ; the house was 
cursed, the very air of it was hateful ; she who had all right 
and title of a great and loyal love could not stoop to dispute 
him, as a wanton disputes her prey. Yet she could not tear 
herself from the place. The very silence that had followed 
on the song and the laugh enthralled her with a horrible 
sorcery. 

He was there, — faithless to both. 

Eleven o’clock struck ; the hours had fled uncounted by her. 
Her horses waited out of sight ; the shadow of some passer- 
by fell now and then across the white breadths of the moon- 
light ; she did not notice it, nor hear the step. 

A heavy sense of bitter humiliation oppressed her, and under 
it burned the smouldering fires of her scorn. She wandered 
and waited there alone, as though she were the guilty wife, 
the wanton paramour ; and above, laughing and singing, was 
that craven sin the world forgave, as friendship ! — a sin so 
craven that not even to itself could it be true. 

She did not reason ; she only felt heart-sick, outraged, in- 
dignant, humbled, stung to a delirious pain. 

Suddenly in the stillness there came the jarring sound of a 
closing door ; she was near the house ; out of it she saw loris 
pass into the moonlight. 

The porter, returning hastily from his wineshop, hurried in 
and drew the bolts and bars for the night’s safety ; loris came 
leisurely forward, along the pavement, in the shadow of the 
walls ; then he saw her, and paused, with a cry, half of pleas- 
ure, half of anger. 

“ Dear, what has happened ?” he murmured, hurriedly, and 
cast a glance around, and saw that there was no one near, and 
would have taken her hands ; but she thrust him quickly from 
her, and gazed up in his face, the whiteness of her skirts 
trailing on the dusty stones, the stars shining above them. 

“ Is this how you keep faith to me?” she said, and her voice 
was very low. 

His face changed ; he took refuge in anger. 

“ Is this how you watch me ? What are you doing here, 
alone, at such an hour ? Are you waiting for me ? I will not 
have you wait so.” 

“ You let her go to your home to-morrow?” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


483 


lie was silent. 

“ You let her go? is it true?” 

He made no answer ; he was very pale ; he strove to take 
her hands again. 

“You are excited and angry; you are unlike yourself. 
How do you come in the streets at such an hour ? where are 
your servants? do you do it to watch me? I will not be 
watched ; I have had enough of that elsewhere, and too 
much. Why are you here ? answer me. I do not under- 
stand ; I will not be watched. If you want to upbraid me ” 

He spoke with all the petulance, the offended waywardness, 
that took a grace in him like that of a spoiled proud child ; 
he was stung by his own conscience, and impatient that he 
had been seen where all the manhood in him told him that it 
was against all manliness to go. 

“ I would not upbraid you,” said Etoile, her voice still very 
low and broken. “ Come a little farther, — farther from that 
house.” 

He walked beside her down the shadow of the street, till 
they were in the white breadth of the moon-rays once more. 

“ Are you going to lie in wait for me any night that I am 
not with you ?” he said, with a sombre irritation, more affected 
than real. “ I fancied I was free from such things as that, 
with you. You have said you trust me. What is trust, if it 
doubt every act, if it measure every moment ? I have had 
too much of this from another.” 

“ Have you had too much, since you still go to that other ?” 

“ Oh, you would reproach me ! you are like other women 
after all ; after all you are no higher than they are ; you sus- 
pect ; you accuse.” 

“ I suspect nothing ; I see you coming from her house ; you 
cannot deny that she is to live in your own home, even now, 
after your promise ?” 

“ I made no promise.” 

“ No promise I” 

He was silent ; the color passed from his face. 

“ I asked you for patience,” he muttered a little later ; “ I 
asked you to trust me and to wait ; yes, I promised ; but one 
is not master of oneself. She is nothing to me : cannot that 
content you ?” 

“ No !” 


/ 


484 


FRIENDSHIP. 


She threw the laces off her head, and the moon-rays shone 
in her wet eyes as they gazed into his. 

“ Dear, I am tired ! Are you angry ? cannot you under- 
stand ? I am not of marble or of clay ; I am only a woman 
that loves you, and that you love. How can I bear it, day 
after day, to know myself first with you, yet live as though I 
were nothing to you before the world, and see you in the 
world’s sight pass as hers ? Oh, my love ! my love ! I have 
had patience, I have kept silence, till my heart is half broken. 
Do you know anything of wh-at I suffer, when I see you by 
her, when I hear your voice in her chamber, as I heard to- 
night ? Do you know ? I think you cannot. It is not that 
I am jealous as you think ; it is that I am ashamed.” 

“ You ashamed !” he muttered, and his pale cheek grew red. 

“ Yes, I am ashamed ! ashamed of my own feebleness, of 
my own lack of power, of my own incompetency to save you 
from the lower life that holds you. Ah, you cannot under- 
stand ! What use are fame, and praise, and power : I have to 
give place to her !” 

All the immeasurable scorn that there was in her launched 
itself out in that one word. 

He moved uneasily and looked away. 

“ You do not know what you say,” he muttered. “ You are 
feverish and agitated. Let us go from here ; to-morrow ” 

“ To-morrow she goes to Fiordelisa.” 

He was silent. 

‘‘ Does she go to Fiordelisa?” 

He was silent still. 

She laughed, a laugh that chilled and terrified him, unlike 
any he had ever heard upon her lips. 

“ And you bewailed your slavery to me in almost the first 
hours that we met ! What use was that, since you live on in 
it by choice ? what use to wake my pity, to come to me and 
lament ? . . . Who is blinded ? who is betrayed ? who is 
befooled ? Is it she, or is it I ? What have you meant of 
all that you have said ? Was all your pain a falsehood ?” 

Every word entered his soul^ as thorns into a wound ; his con- 
science smote him bitterly, but for that very cause his anger rose. 

“ You insult me ! perhaps I merit it. Who can know what 
to do, where two women claim every moment and watch every 
word ? I lead the life of a hound I Falsehood ? yes, without 


FRIENDSHIP. 485 

liberty there is always falsehood. But you leave me no more 
freedom than she does.” 

“ I leave you all freedom. Are you not free to go to her ?” 

The blood beat in her temples, the stars swam before her 
eyes ; intense bitterness, intense humiliation, intense anguish, 
were all at war in her ; she scarcely knew what she said. 

“ Are you not free to go to her ?” she repeated ; “ free to 
drag my name through the dust for her diversion ? free to let 
me be mocked and slandered by her, you silent all the while ?” 

“ She never names you.” 

“ That is untrue. She taunts me with an unanswered love, 
and you stand by and let the shameful lie be said.” 

“ If you choose to believe the lies of others ” 

Her unwonted passion broke into a low sob. 

“ Oh, my love, whom would I believe against you ? Not 
all the world ! But can you say to me on your honor that 
she knows the truth ?” 

“ No,” he said, with a fierce roughness most uncommon in 
him ; “ no, she does not know the truth. I have not told her. 
I am a coward. You have been pleased to say so.” 

She made no answer. 

She would have sooner heard him tell her she must die. 

“ It is the temple of lies,” he said, bitterly, with a backward 
gesture of contempt towards the house that stood in the gloom 
behind them. “ I have lived among them till they are part 
of me. What does she know ? She knows nothing. If she 
could tell that I had even kissed your lips she would kill me.” 

“ Are you afraid ?” 

She turned and looked at him with a cold disdain that hurt 
him more than all her rival’s wildest savagery of wrath. 

“ You insult me !” he said, under his b^reath ; and his eyes 
grew sombre and full of fire, but they wandered from her own. 

Suddenly she took his hands and held them in her own 
against her breast. 

“ My beloved, I will ask your forgiveness for such insult on 
my knees if you will tell me, with your eyes on mine, that 
you will go back to that house now and tell her all. All ! — 
before another hour goes.” 

She felt his heart beat quickly. 

He looked on the ground and not at her. 

“ You are but a woman like the rest,” he said, with evasive 
41 * 


486 


FRIENDSHIP. 


irritation. “ It is not my love you want : it is triumph over 
a rival.” 

She dropped his hands and turned away from him. After 
all the hours of their perfect love, was this all that he knew 
of her? 

“ Go to her,” she said, as she put him from her with a ges- 
ture. “ Go to her : it is she who is fit mate for you, — not I !” 

The words severed them as steel cuts the skein of life in 
twain forever. 

The moonlight fell between them in a chill, pale space of 
joyless light. 

Not looking back once, she went away from him into the 
shadow where her horses waited. He stood like a man who 
has had a mortal blow, but keeps erect from pride. 

He did not follow her. 

Their lives were divided forever, as the chill moonlight 
severed their shadows. 

A casement above, a stone’s throw off in the gloom, closed 
quietly, and behind it, in the darkness, another woman laughed 
to herself, — well content. 

All things come to those who know how to wait. She had 
only had to wait, in patience and darkness, without seeming to 
stir a hand, and the end she desired had come. 

To hold without mercy, and to be deaf and blind to all that 
told her the truth, — this had been her strength, and it had 
conquered. 

With the morrow to Fiordelisal 


CHAPTER XLVIIl. 

That night Etoile wrote the truth to her. 

When she had told it, she wrote on : 

“ You need fear me no more ; he and I are parted, so you may 
listen to me for a moment. You are stronger than I ; you have 
known how to keep him against his will, and how to ruin his 
strength and his peace and his fortunes; will you not have pity 
now? Pity on him. He does not love you ; he was weary of 
you so long, long ago. When I met him first, his captivity was 


FRIENDSHIP. 


487 


bitter and dreary to him ; you must see this — if you would see 
it — in a hundred signs and ways. I now ask you to set him free. 
Not for me. I swear to you that we can never again be anything 
to each other, because there is the black pit of a cruel lie set like 
a gulf between him and me. I only ask you for his sake. What 
is the life you lead him ? A life j oyiess, galling, j aded, unworthy 
of manhood, robbed of all effort and all hope. You hurt his 
honor, you stain his name, you make him a byword and a jest. 
You call this friendship, — to the world. I tell you that it is 
the basest and most cruel passion that ever fed its vanity on the 
ruin of another soul. I have surrendered him, and I will never 
claim him if you will set him free, — ^free to find purer faiths 
and happier ties than mine or yours, free to be able to look his 
future in the face and feel it his own, — not mine nor yours. 
What can 1 say to you? how can I move you? You are a 
base woman, and you have never loved him in any noble sense 
of love one hour ; but, sacrifice me as you like, jest at me, jeer 
at me, drag my name in the dust, do anything you will of ven- 
geance on me, — only set him free.” 

The tears fell from her eyes and scorched and blurred the 
paper. 

Then she tore it up, and burnt it. 

What use was it to cry to the dead wall, to beat the gates 
of brass? Sooner will the wall hear, sooner will the brass 
melt, than the heart of a cruel woman have pity. 


CHAPTER XLIX. 

It is five o’clock on a summer afternoon at Fiordelisa. 

In the old gray court there is the tinkle of teacups, the 
smell of cigar-smoke, the sounds of a guitar ; the red bignonea 
on the south wall is all aglow with Wossom ; the peacock is 
strutting among the long grass ; the bees are humming above 
the strawberry flowers. Lady Joan is laughing and singing 
and thrumming the chords of the guitar ; she is lying back on 
a low easy-chair ; she feels happy. 

People have been lunching with her, a few good decorous 
people who are now strolling about in and out the cortile and 


488 


FRIENDSHIP. 


gardens, one with another ; amidst them Mr. Silverly Bell is 
murmuring to Mrs. Macscrip, — 

“ Oh, yes ; it is quite an old story now, but only too true, 
unfortunately, only too true.” 

“ What really ? That she lay in wait for him after mid- 
night?” 

“Ah, quite truel and by dear Lady Joan’s house, too, 
making such a scandal I As if Lady Joan had anything — 
anything — of an incorrect interest in her friend ! . . . ” 

“ Shameful I” cries a chorus of the small gentilities and 
the free-born republicans. 

“ And she tried to stab him, didn’t she, with a dagger out 
of her studio?” says that sprightly lady, Mrs. Henry V. 
Clams, plucking some heliotrope. 

Mr. Silverly Bell sighs and is pained. 

“ Oh, no, that is exaggerated ; at least I trust it is exag- 
gerated. loris is such a gentleman ; he never says a word ; it 
is difficult to know the truth ; but some people were passing, 
and saw ... it is very painful. I used to like her, I really 
did use to like her. Yes, she has a charm of manner ; yes, 
until one knows. But no character, you know, and no capi- 
tal. ... I believe she has had great losses ; that she wanted 
loris that night to assist her in some great money trouble, but 
that kind of thing only makes it very much worse.” 

“ Very much worse,” answers Mrs. Macscrip. “ Myself I 
never will know artists : I am thankful that I did not infringe 
on my rule for her.” 

“You may be so, indeed!” says Mr. Silverly Bell, and he 
sighs. 

“ My ! she warn’t hard up for money ; that I’ll bet some,” 
cried Mrs. Henry Y. Clams, casting cake to the peacock. 
“ She’s took Bocaldi to shut herself up in, for good and all, 
and she won’t sell that queer picture Sordello, though they’d 
give her long chalks for it if she would.” 

Mr. Silverly Bell sighs again, and, as he stoops over the 
daisies, murmurs, — 

“ Infatuation — aberration 1” 

“ You don’t call on her never now ?” inquires Mrs. Henry 
V. Clams. 

Mr. Silverly Bell feels his silvery hair rise erect from his 
head. “Calll Calif my dear madam !” 


FRIENDSHIP. 


489 


“ You are so almighty virtuous, Mr. Bell, you’d have saved 
Sodom and changed Lot into salt,” says that giddy soul, with 
a fine scriptural confusion of memories. “ Alberto, bring the 
break round, and go and get my shawl.” 

“ Dear Mr. Bell feels as we all do,” said Miss Maijory 
Scrope-Stair. “ Any friend of dear Joan’s must hold her as 
an enemy ; and any friend of poor lo’s also. Besides, any 
woman must feel shocked and grieved. Why is talent always 
allied to a deficient moral character ?” 

No one replies to this general interrogation, but Mrs. 
Henry V. Clams clinches the matter. 

“ She’s a downright silly not to give it all the go-by, and 
run back, and lark around in her own Paris. Nobody can’t 
ever understand artists though, they’re that queer. . . . 
Biddle-me-ree and double acrostics is nothing to ’em. Is 
Alberto gone to get that drag ?” 

Meanwhile loris hears what the Lady Joan is saying. 

Some one has asked her if she stays the summer here, and 
she answers, with a smile, — 

“ Oh, yes ; you know I have so much to do here ; they 
would miss me so. I even think we shall winter here. It is 
so much warmer than the city, and we are all so happy to- 
gether. Besides, you know, poor lo is ruined, or very nearly. 
We shall help him if we live here; you know how great my 
husband’s friendship is for him, and mine too. We mind no 
sacrifice for a friend 1” 

loris hears ; and he has lost the power and the right to avenge. 

The drag comes round, and other equipages. They troop 
away joyously, leaving only Burletta, who is casting up 
accounts in a memorandum-book, in the midst of the straw- 
berries ; and Marjory Scrope-Stair, who as she passes her 
friend kisses the hand that is toying with the guitar, and 
kisses it gushingly but loyally. It is the hand that has fast- 
locked the fresh fetters. 

Mrs. Henry V. Clams, who is shrewd in her own way, and 
has brought a gleam of the national Yankee humor with her 
out of the land of wooden nutmegs, is tickled at what she has 
heard, and laughs to herself as she goes away. 

“ My word !” she murmurs, as she drives through the gates. 
“ If Alberto were to go and fall in love with anybody I won- 
der if I’d be as clever as that, and be able to turn the tables 

V* 


490 


FRIENDSHIP. 


on the other one and make her look like the good-for-naught? 
My word ! no : I shouldn’t have patience. I should just go 
and slap her face.” 

And she feels her own inferiority to the Temple of the 
Virtues. 

The afternoon sun sinks lower ; the color deepens ; the 
scent of the blossoms grows stronger. Burletta shuts up 
his account-book and comes and sits on a stool beside the 
guitar. 

Mr. Challoner reclines in a rocking-chair. 

The little girl plays with a shuttlecock. 

Lady Joan laughs, and now and then she sings. 

She has condemned him to perpetual bondage, to lifelong 
weariness, to endless degradation ; she has taken his life like a 
pressed fruit and wrung it to the core ; she has exiled from him 
all joy, all hope, all peace. Never shall his offspring laugh in 
the old home of his fathers ; never shall any child smile in his 
eyes with the smile of a woman he loved ; never shall any glad- 
ness of liberty rise for him in his barren years ; never shall 
any human happiness be his. 

Never, never any more, so long as her life shall last and 
feed on his, and sit by his, and wait and watch, as the tigress 
waits and watches by the dead creature it has slain. 

She has killed him more cruelly than those kill who slaughter 
the body. 

But what of that ? She is well-content. 

She shoots her cats and robins, she garners her grain, she 
fills her purse ; she rules at Fiordelisa. 

Honor is gone from him, and peace, and hope, and God. 

But what of that? She rules at Fiordelisa. 

In his chamber alone sits loris, having escaped the scene 
for a moment. 

His heart is sick, his life is weary. 

For lack_of an hour’s courage he has surrendered all his 
future to bondage. 

One single falsehood at the first has sprung up into a giant 
tree poisonous as the upas, and spreading in fetid darkness for 
evermore betwixt him and the light of heaven. 

If he had been but true ! 

He sits in his solitude, — so rare a blessing is this solitude, 
which she perpetually denies him, — and the smell of the smoke 


FRIENDSHIP. % 491 

and the tinkle of the guitar rise in the air to him, and he 
loathes them. 

“lo! lo!” cries a voice, shrill, loud, imperious. “lo ! come 
down directly, or I shall come up to you !” 

Of the two evils he takes the lesser. 

He goes down, with a low sigh and a slow step. 

It is for this woman that he has lost the world, and lost 
the thing that is greater and deeper than all the world, — a 
love that never dies. 

He descends his old stone staircase wearily and listlessly ; 
sullenly and silently he enters the court and throws himself 
into a garden-seat in the shadow of an old arched doorway. 

She strikes her guitar sharply. 

You look as glum as an owl, lo 1 How ungrateful of 
you, when we are going to make your fortune out of the 
Coral Isles !” 

“ I am tired,” he mutters, wearily. 

She laughs : she does not care whether he is tired or not. 
She has him safe, her prey forever, through one sad untruth. 

The red sun sinks, the red flowers blaze. The child is at 
play. The smoke curls lightly up among the blossoms. It 
is dreamy and warm. Mr. Challoner, stretched peacefully in 
his chair, dozes, with a handkerchief over his closed eyes, 
and thinks. There are the Coral Isles. loris is poor. A 
little more speculation, like the piles in the Sirens’ Sea, and 
who knows ? Old lands are soon ruined and old names soon 
tarnished. Fiordelisa is a nice place. loris is not very strong. 
Fiordelisa would make a pretty dower for Effie in years to 
come ; and is there not a title that goes with the estate ? 

Mr. Challoner in his mind’s eye sees his grandchildren 
reigning here, where the children of loris will be never born. 

The Watchdog sits humbly in the shade by the glass doors, 
and works at a cushion that her friend has begun and has tired 
of, and ever and again fastens thirsty, longing, anxious eyes 
upon loris, and thinks to herself, “ Festina hntey Pazienza ! 
Who knows? Sometimes a sick and sorrowful soul, jaded 
and indifferent, falls to the watcher that waits for it, as the 
beautiful moth with broken wing falls into the web of the 
patient and crafty spider spinning in the dust : who knows ?” 

The Lady Joan, with the riband of the guitar lying loose in 
her hand, shuts her watchful eyes also, and only does not 


492 


FRIENDSHIP. 


dream because she never dreams. She is a woman of action, 
not a simpleton. She thinks instead; thinks, and smiles as 
she thinks. 

She has got all she wants, she has done all she wished, she is 
luxuriously content ; she feels victorious as Napoleon at Jena. 
She will reign alone at Fiordelisa. Meanwhile, if they become 
needful, there are Theodore and the Coral Isles. If loris 
prove restive she will send him to the Coral Isles, and go into 
society and smile and be smiled at, and say, “ Ah, poor lo ! 
so sad ; but we are doing all we can to save his property.” 
And she and society will smile on each other more sweetly 
than ever; and as she thinks of all this the picture pleases 
her so that for once her busy brain grows sleepy, and she also 
dreams till the guitar glides oflF her knee, and the chords that 
have hymned her amorous songs so often, to so many ears, are 
broken. 

loris alone dares not dream, because for him hope is dead 
and liberty has perished. 


At the same hour, as the sun sinks low, Etoile prays in 
her chamber. 

“ Forgive me that I erred in haste and pain. Forgive me 
that I had neither wisdom nor strength. 0 God, forgive me, 
and make him happy, though I forever suffer !” 

Is prayer only a dream too ? 


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